


Razorblade Sigh

by MadAndy



Series: Tattoos And Alibis [1]
Category: Gamma Ray
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-11
Updated: 2011-07-11
Packaged: 2017-10-21 06:41:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 40,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/222063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadAndy/pseuds/MadAndy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written in 2006</p>
    </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2006

_  
****  
_

Part One

Henjo shifted uncomfortably in front of the computer screen, gripped his cigarette end in his teeth, rattled his fingers on the keyboard and growled.

He knew he probably shouldn’t be reading gig reviews; after all, here he was, laid up at home all bust up and in pain and where were the others? Off prancing around Eastern Europe with the addition of two nice young things to the lineup. Kai was bound to notice them. And what Kai noticed, Kai wanted. And what Kai wanted, Kai got.

He studied the offending lines again, muttering under his breath.

 _Kai was in his own element with the guitar behind the mic. His joy and excitement on the stage were delighful to follow and even he enthusiastically moved on the stage along with the hired guy around the stage, obviously the young blood made Kai act more active on the stage._

Apart from the horrible English of the reviewer - enough to give anyone fits, he reckoned - the pictures that accompanied the words were enough to make him swear. There was Dirk, bare bloody chested as usual, and as for Kai, well. Rub against the kid, why don’t you?

As far as Henjo was concerned the boss might just as well have screwed his replacement on stage - after all, once you knew him you knew exactly what the sly little looks the camera had captured so well meant. And the bassist’s smugness had to be seen to be believed; of course he’s smug, thought Henjo as he shoved his chair back and gathered his crutches, I’m not there, am I? Which means he can do as he damn well pleases wherever he wants.

Backstage. In the hotel. On the bus. Where. Fucking. Ever.

Hobbling through to the kitchen he muttered under his breath, cigarette end bouncing from the motion, scattering ash across the carpet. Yes, he felt miserable; though he and Kai had never had an exclusive relationship - going so far as to deny to each other that they had a relationship at all - while he was there at least the three of them achieved some sort of balance. Neither he nor Dirk, he of the naked, muscular chest and no shyness about flashing it, managed to monopolise Kai; they hung in an uneasy balance, the two of them orbiting their friend’s brighter light like a pair of lustful satellites. Sane? Sensible?

No.

But it seemed to work. Had done for ten years and now?

Now Dirk was there and he was not and the jealousy tore through him like fire. The fact that in addition to blasted Dirk there were also the two cute young Finns on hand didn’t help at all. In fact, even the thought that no doubt Dirk was going crazy trying to keep Kai away from them brought no comfort; he’d come back and they - well, one of them - would be gone. And it had looked, just before his forced absence, as though Dan had pretty much monopolised the shy keyboardist so what did that leave?

Right, one horny frontman chasing a young guitarist round the showers and then falling into the muscular arms of his bassist later.

Dammit!

Now if Kai could just make up his mind--

“Ye gods but you’re a bitter thing, aren’t you? If you hate it that much why do you stay?”

Henjo stumbled in surprise, spitting his cigarette out and catching the tip of one crutch awkwardly on the carpet. One thing led to another and he found himself sprawled on the floor, glaring at a pair of dirty black boots that occupied a patch of his kitchen floor and wondering why the fuck a burglar would have been sitting on his counter top smoking like she - she? - hadn’t a care in the world.

Trying to rise just made the torn ligaments in his knees shriek with pain - and the bruises on his back and shoulders wake up and grumble too - so with a gasp he just stayed down, waited for his head to stop spinning and thought furiously about calling the police. Not that he could do anything, of course, but thinking about calling the cops and seeing this...this... _person_ thrown in the back of a van made him feel better. A little bit better anyway.

The boots came closer, and from the movement of the ankles he knew the person - woman, OK, yes - was kneeling down. He lifted his head a little. Not too far, because he’d hurt that in the fall too and didn’t have the range of movement he would normally have, so it was a strange kind of half twist that brought his gaze a little further up than floor level, although not far.

The woman was crouched down, head cocked on one side, watching him struggle. Her elbows rested on her knees, wrists dangling loosely between her legs, and her expression certainly wasn’t what he would have expected from a burglar caught ransacking a flat. She rolled her eyes.

“I wasn’t ransacking _anything_ , mate. I was just sitting there waiting for you to finish reading that gig review and angsting your bollocks off.”

“I was not... _angsting_. Get out of my house.”

“You’re not in the least bit curious as to who I am or why I’m here?”

“Get out before I throw you out!”

“You and whose army, my friend?”

Henjo growled and glared. Tempting as it was to snarl ‘just me’ he didn’t think she’d believe him, what with him being flat on his face and her cocking her head to look down at him with that faintly amused expression. No, it wouldn’t sound threatening at all. Pathetic, possibly.

The woman snorted, scrunching herself a little lower and fixing him with her rather disturbing gaze. It took Henjo a moment to pin down what it was that was making him want to look away from her eyes; they were odd. Not odd as in looking in different directions, but odd as in one was bright blue and the other a dark, rich brown, barely a shade away from black. Tiny crows feet beside her eyes tightened as she smiled, but her age could have been anything between a sun-weathered twenty and a well preserved forty; he couldn’t tell and right now didn’t care. Her hair, a lock of which flopped in front of the burning blue eye only to be puffed back out of the way, was black and glossy; it must have been a trick of the light, but it looked like shafts of electric blue highlights writhed through it like lightning, a crackle of static through the deepness of the background colour.

He let his head flop to the floor with a thump and closed his eyes. Other than the weird eyes and the very odd hair all he could see of the rest was black; tattered leather jacket, shirt, boots, jeans... all black. So she was either a paramilitary with some very strange off duty hobbies or a goth burglar.

Or worse. Remember, Henjo, he told himself, there’s always worse.

A finger poked his shoulder. He ignored it.

“Hey.”

Perhaps if he played dead she’d go away.

“Henjo Oliver Richter get your ass up off this floor. I have to talk to you and we don’t have much time.”

Giving up, he let her assist him in rolling himself over and staggering to his feet. She propped him against the doorframe and fetched his crutches, then began to potter around his kitchen putting a pot of coffee on to brew. He watched her, speechless; she appeared to be completely familiar with his kitchen, going to the right cupboards without the slightest hint of hesitation, acting as though she owned the place. He swallowed his irritation; had she been watching him? Stalking him?

The irritation began to turn to fear, and she turned and eyed him with amusement.

“No mate, I haven’t been stalking you. But you were thinking about coffee, so all I did was pick out the relevant information. It’s easy, really. Parlour trick. Now,” and she hopped up onto the counter again, grinning at his expression of disbelief like a wolf, “talk to me. Your horny little lead singer is giving you cause for concern, yes?”

“That’s none of your business,” snapped Henjo, scowling at her. “Get out of my house.”

She shrugged, bouncing down from the counter and pouring him a mug of coffee, glancing at him with a half smile before preparing it just how he liked it and shoving the mug in his hand as she passed him.

“Fair enough squire. But don’t you think it’s interesting that just when you decided to have a little chat with Mister-Power-Slut about the competition you fall down the stairs and end up back at home?”

Something twitched in Henjo’s stomach, and he turned and shoved the coffee on the side before he dropped it and added scalding to his list of injuries. The woman swung toward his door with a loose, relaxed stride, and despite himself Henjo hobbled after her.

“Wait...what?”

She paused with her hand on the doorknob. “Something weird happening around the place. Odd comings and goings at strange times. And you noticed it, and you were going to speak to Kai about it and wallop. You’re back here in Hamburg up to your assfeathers in painkillers for the foreseeable future. Funny that. But since you clearly want me gone I’ll be off. Toodloo.”

Henjo lifted his crutch and used it to slam the door shut, just missing her fingertips.

“What?” he snapped, narrowing his eyes at her. She grinned, unrepentant.

“Me. I go now.”

“No. What are you talking about?”

The woman rolled her eyes and folded her arms, leaning back against the door and cocking her head to look up at him. He glared back, realising with a start that she was very short indeed, even shorter than Kai; she couldn’t be much more than five three or five four, although when she glared at him with those odd eyes she seemed much larger.

Of course, when you’re lying on the floor in too much pain to think straight and somebody is looming over you it doesn’t matter how short they are. They’re going to look big and scary, aren’t they?

He decided to push it, and straightened his back to lean over her a little more. She grinned.

“There’s brave. Now do you want me gone so you can sit here and feel sorry for yourself, or are you going to talk to me like a sensible human being?”

Henjo thought about this for a moment, then sighed. He might as well give in.

“Good lad.”

He glared at her, and swung his crutch back to the ground. “Shut up. What’s your name, anyway?”

“I,” said the woman with a grin as wide as a dog’s, “am Yoz.”

~*~

The demon watched from its warm nest in the mind of the man. All those people...!

And all staring at him. Reaching their hands out, calling to him, look at me, notice me, be with me, touch me.

He stirred, and the man stumbled; couldn’t have that now, could we? The others up here on this noisy, bright lit stage might notice there was something wrong and then oh dear oh dear. Couldn’t be having that. Because. Riding in the head of someone like this? Brilliant idea.

Prey just fell over itself to get to you... and no figuring out how to get out of town afterwards without being noticed, just hop on a bus or a plane and off you went. Rock stars were expected to behave oddly, and never kept normal hours so turning up just before dawn to stagger into the shower? Ha.

The first time they’d left town after a feeding the demon had lurked so deep it could hardly see out of the man’s eyes. Any moment now, it had thought, there’s going to be a shout. A rush of uniforms. Stop! Murder!

Nothing.

It had taken it two days to get over the shock.

And here they were, months and months later and still nobody had made the connection.

Well.

Maybe one.

But he was out of the way now, wasn’t he? Shame he didn’t break his neck when he fell, but then, nothing was perfect; by the time he returned the man would be hollowed out like an old log and the demon would be ready to move along. And if nobody had noticed, well, then the skinny, bushy haired one would make an excellent host. And considering how easy they were to replace the tour would continue, and so would the feeding...

The demon grinned through the face of the man, and the crowd went wild.

~*~

“You’re crazy.”

Yoz sighed. It was always, and she meant always, the same. Tell ‘em what the problem was, endure the usual no-it’s-not-you’re-nuts freakout session, then have to explain magic and how it pertained to their lives. Every single time. One day, she thought acidly, one day it would be really nice to have somebody blink at her and say fine, so what do we do, then?

It would make a very pleasant change.

Not going to happen today, though.

She picked herself up off the couch and made her way back through to the kitchen, grabbing Henjo’s mug as she went past then bringing him a full one back. Settling back into the comfortable cushions she turned the mug in her hands, gathering strength for the next phase.

“Alright. Let’s try this again. I am a person who uses magic, a Magus, who specialises in sorting out magical problems for people who don’t deal with this shit on a daily basis. Which is most people. You have noticed weird shit going on with your band mates during this tour, right? Odd hours being kept. Funny smells in hotel rooms. Groupies vanishing. Suspicious stains in tourbus facilities. Noises. And it was getting worse, yeah?”

“Yeah, but--”

She held up a hand. “You were going to talk to Kai but fell down some stairs before you could speak to him. And ever since you’ve been back here wondering what the fuck is going on. Fretting. Angsting.”

“Yeah, but--”

“You didn’t fall, you were pushed. By the creature that has possessed one of your band and no, I don’t yet know who pushed you down the stairs to conceal their demon and its activities. It was trying to kill you. It was the anger that caught my attention. When a demon throws a shit fit it makes ripples that somebody like me can’t help but notice.”

“Yeah, but--”

“But _what?_ ”

“ _Demons?_ Demons don’t exist.”

One more try. Change tack. “Look. I’ve worked with musicians before. You buggers are signed to Sanctuary, aren’t you?”

Henjo nodded, long face still wearing a very unhappy expression.

“Ring Rod Smallwood. He knows me. He won’t be very nice about me, but he _does_ know me.”

“Why won’t--”

“I showed one of his mob how to break a spell, once. And now he’s more into magic than he should be and Smallmind blames me, but that’s another story. And a couple of guys he works with in LA needed me last year - anyway, he can tell you about it. He’ll also warn you to stay away from me but if you press him he’ll admit that I do get results. Go on, call him. Tell him Yoz says hello.”

She waited while Henjo put in a call to management, and they agreed to get a message to Rod. Assured he would be called back he put the phone down and stared at the woman, nibbling his lip and frowning. Was she just a random nutter, broken in to his home and weaving tales of demons to put him off guard before cutting his throat?

Rolling her eyes she sat forward, leaning as close as she could to where Henjo sat in his chair.

“Look, I’m not a danger to you. But I can help you if you will just fucking _relax_ and let me help you - I know, I know, demons. Magic. You don’t believe in it, right?”

“You are right.”

“I know I’m right. This left leg is the worst, yeah?”

He nodded, slowly, anxiety shading the gentle brown eyes at the sudden change of subject. Maybe she was going to torture him until he agreed with her? Yoz shook her head and came forward, kneeling by his feet. She rolled the sleeves of her black top up, and Henjo gasped; every available inch of skin writhed with tattoos in black, green, blue, flashing yellow and twisting threads of white and gold. They even covered her hands, something he hadn’t noticed earlier; she laughed at him under her breath, and he blushed. He’d caught himself wondering just how much skin was covered in the strange designs, and by her expression she knew it.

“All over, mate. Alllllll fucking over and yes they did hurt and no, you can’t see them all. Yet. Now. Relax, eh?”

Murmuring under her breath she cupped her hands over his knee, cocking her head and unfocusing her eyes. To his utter astonishment the air under her palms began to glow, tendrils of warm golden light snaking around his leg and tickling their way down his calves, wrapping warmth around his feet before creeping back up to mid thigh. They settled on the fabric of his jeans, sinking through but still, somehow, visible; her voice crooned away in the background, comforting and caressing his mind while the golden strands worked at his injured leg.

They became brighter, shading from their soft gold through bright yellow to white, lifting into a shining mist that made him throw a hand up to cover his eyes from the dazzle. Still blinking spots away from his vision he flinched when the woman’s voice whispered in his ear.

“Now you walk on that leg and think about me, right? Rod’s going to call you back in a minute, and then I want you to think some more. I’ll see you in the morning, and we’ll finish our nice little chat then, that all OK with you?”

He blinked, shook his head, looked over his shoulder. Nothing. She’d vanished.

Leaning forward to get up he was grabbing his crutches when another thought struck him; he was putting weight on his left leg and it didn’t hurt. At all. Not so much as a twinge, and the hospital had been very sure to hammer into his head the fact that the ligaments were damaged almost beyond repair, and would take months to heal, if they ever did. He might, they’d said, need surgery on them once the initial healing phase was over but whatever happened he’d always have a dodgy knee.

He flexed it. Nothing.

He stood up, put all his weight on it.

Still nothing.

The shrilling of the phone beside him made him jump, cursing for a moment before snatching the receiver up in a hand that, he tried not to notice, was shaking; an unfamiliar voice boomed out at him, the very English accent beginning the conversation with a list of exactly why he should have no truck whatsoever with a certain Yolanda Bowsher, also known as Yoz and all around dangerous person, pervert and Bad News to have hanging around.

Henjo held the phone away from his ear and stared at it.

Well, shit. Looked like all he could do was wait until she came back in the morning and then, well... maybe he’d find out what was going on.

In the meantime, however--

He sat back down in the chair, made himself comfortable, and listened to Rod Smallwood rant.

~*~

Yoz made her way down the corridor to the empty apartment two doors away. The owners were on holiday, making it a perfect bolthole for her; locks and bolts barely even slowed her down, but she didn’t have to sleep in their beds or steal their food, although some minor cupboard ransacking had happened. Even Mages needed sustenance, after all.

But no, the important thing was merely somewhere undisturbed. Somewhere behind a door. A broom closet would have done, in a pinch, but she hated having to slip away into a mere storage cupboard; if anyone saw her doing so it always seemed rather, well, silly.

She stood in the middle of the terribly sensible, designer influenced living room and fished around in her pocket for the one thing she truly owned. Finding it she pulled it out and balanced it on her palm, taking a moment - as she usually did - to admire the cool, slick sphere in the light. All colours and no colours swirled across its surface, turning and rolling like smoke, reflecting the light and one moment appearing mirrored, the next a matt black so deep the very light itself fell into it and was lost.

Smiling, Yoz closed her eyes and spoke a phrase, feeling the cool globe shiver and dissipate, vanishing from her palm even as the texture of the air surrounding her changed.

Opening her eyes she couldn’t suppress a grin. Her room, a fragment of her original home but after so many years of carrying it around in its own little pocket of space-time so much more. It had been a gift to her from her dying mother, the only thing she had left beside memories; the room - subdivided by floor to ceiling bookcases filled with dusty leather tomes of arcane and dangerous knowledge - existed outside of this reality, in an unused Universe all of its own. Yoz had once tried to work out exactly how the spell that held it worked, but had given up in the end. It was tight, technical magic, and a quantum physicist would probably have made perfect sense of the mixture of equations and incantations that protected and created it.

Yoz specialised in wilder magic, on the whole.

But her room travelled with her, and over the years she’d noticed something else about her travelling bolthole. Shaped and cradled by magic as it was, not to mention existing in a completely separate - if parallel - Universe with its own rules it had become rather more than the sum of its parts. Maybe it was the emotions of its resident Magus, maybe it was the books - but however it had happened the place was, by pretty much any reasonable definition, alive.

She dropped her head back and sighed deeply, almost a groan as she took in the familiar surroundings with something approaching relief. Healing the injured knee had taken a frightening amount of energy; healing magic was hard work. It drew upon the energies of the spellcaster, and if said caster committed themselves to too severe an injury the magic could drain the life force until there wasn’t enough left to keep the basic functions working. It was a branch of magic that required great self sacrifice, and hence one that Yoz tried to avoid as much as possible. Too damn dangerous.

Her room appeared to agree; a spicy scent tickled her nose and she chuckled, knowing without turning that on her desk was now waiting an elegant goblet of mulled wine. She looked up at the vaulted wooden ceiling of her home and nodded.

“Thanks, but it’s not that bad. Really. Just a few bust up ligaments.”

The temperature dropped a little, and she laughed.

“Worrier. A good night’s kip and I’ll be just fine.”

The atmosphere warmed, and she made her way to the great oak desk that sat by the back wall, surrounded by baskets of paper, heaps of CDs and odds and ends of magical junk she’d accumulated over the years. Once she made herself comfortable in the big, comforting leather chair that sat behind it she could kick back, watch the fire flickering away in its niche on the opposite wall and really, truly relax. Once the door - from this side a huge thing, ages old oak bound with iron so ancient it was almost fossilised - was closed, she was effectively absent from what most people considered the normal world. It would take more power than any one Magus could summon up to breach her defences, and as she wasn’t currently being hunted by anyone with that sort of clout she could rely on her room to warn her and just chill out.

She sipped at the goblet and thought hard. Two things occupied her mind; did Henjo believe her, and what was going on with the absent band members?

After all, a demon loose in the world was very bad news. This one, clever and cunning like all its kin, was causing real trouble; nobody had yet put together all the deaths in the cities that Gamma Ray played in but it could only be a matter of time. All that was keeping them out of the suspicion was the very randomness of the crimes. No one type, sex, age, skin colour - nothing to tie them all in.

Unless you could see the world with a different set of senses, of course. Then the scarlet flares of the demon’s hunger showed up like a blood splash on a snowfield, pulsing and angry and raw. The souls of the dead fought to escape, giving up their energies in a blue gold flare of despair as the demon consumed them, too.

Yoz gritted her teeth, and rummaged in her desk drawer for something to eat. Munching slowly on a cereal bar - hardly a solid meal but it would keep her going - she reflected on demons. Not all of them were bad, as supernatural monsters went. There were some that could almost be classified as decent chaps, as long as you kept their essentially selfish nature firmly in mind. No, the _really_ bad stuff wasn’t evil, exactly; more like stasis, absolute zero, nothingness. Good and evil were just two shades of the same thing.

Philosophy aside, however, there was a demon out there killing people. And if there was one thing she hated, it was a supernatural beastie flaunting its power when she could do something about it - not to mention the fact that destroying it meant she would get to hang out with rock musicians, show off, and ultimately not only piss off the Lords of Hell but possibly get laid into the bargain. If you couldn’t have love - and it was a bad thing to indulge in if your lifestyle was as dangerous as hers was, and you had as many enemies - then lust was a pretty adequate substitute, in her opinion.

She grinned, and dropped the wrapper into the basket next to her, rummaging through it until she came up with a cloudy sphere of crystal. Yes, using a crystal ball wasn’t usually her style but the alternative would take ages. If she didn’t use this it meant a long session of out-of-body astral travel, dangerous at the best of times; when hunting demons - even just when spying on them - it paid to conserve one’s energies. Especially when one was drained from having to showboat to impress a punter.

Yoz snorted, propped the crystal ball on her desk between three books and focused her energies on it. This was simple stuff. She could have used a bowl of water, a mirror or anything reflective; the crystal had been closest to hand, however, and she’d had it for a very long time so it warmed to her aura in an instant, barely fighting her at all.

Henjo was easy. He was so close by - despite being, technically, in another Universe - that she had to back off the amount of power she was using to avoid blurring the image. He was sitting staring at the phone, chewing on a fingernail and looking worried; gently expanding the field of the crystal’s influence she got a feel for what had been happening in the last hour or so. He’d spoken to Smallwood, and rung Kai - leaving a message on his mobile to get in touch, urgently.

Now he was just sitting and fretting, and much as she wanted to go out there and pet his bushy hair she really didn’t have time. He seemed quite sweet, really. Shame he had to get mixed up in such a nasty case and stood such a good chance of winding up dead, possessed or both. Whatever, he would keep.

The next target was a little harder. She swung the focus of the crystal up, tracked until she found the stench of demon then followed it. Ah, they were just coming off stage...

She scowled, tightening the focus but no, she still couldn’t fix which person was carrying the demon. Dammit! All she was getting was the showers and--

Yoz whistled, watching the goings on with wide eyes. Well now. No bloody wonder a demon found them with that sort of thing going on; lust was one of the things that a demon could track like a bird dog, follow right back to the luster and wham. While your mind was revelling in physical sensation it was an easy target, if you knew how to attack it right; the way these guys were carrying on now she herself could have possessed them all in a heartbeat - had she wanted to.

Occupied in watching the steamy play going on in the shower it took her a moment to realise that the crystal was heating up, trembling in its makeshift stand. Blinking, she brushed her fingertips over its surface, snatching her hand back with a yelp. The demon, sensing her own less than pure thoughts no doubt, had followed the line of her energy right back to the crystal and was now attempting to break through. She sat back, sending a tendril of power ghosting over the smooth surface, bolstering the crystalline structure while she watched the demon probing at her defences and wondered what to do about it.

Well, give it a little slap - and see who fell over.

She took a breath, clapped her hands and dived under the desk.

The crystal lifted from the table, hesitated for a moment then exploded like a bomb, scattering glittering shards all over the room, embedding themselves in the wooden panelling of the walls and bouncing from the stone surround of the fire. Yoz waited until the tinkling had stopped, then poked her head out from under the desk.

The room was filled with the acrid stench of sulphur and felt heavy with disapproval.

“Sorry,” said Yoz, and laughed. Now all she needed to do was get something shiny and see what she’d wrought with her little poke.

~*~

Kasperi came haring out of the showers, barely remembering to wrap a towel around his waist as he charged out of the door and grabbed the first roadie he saw.

“Call an ambulance!”

“What-?”

“Is Kai and Dirk! They were just--”

The young man stopped, and decided that part of the story really didn’t need to be spread any further than absolutely necessary.

“What?”

He gritted his teeth and glared at the grinning roadie. “Call. A fucking. Ambulance. They’ve collapsed!”

The older man blinked, colour draining from his face.

“ _Collapsed?_ ”

“Yes! And they’re bleeding from their eyes and their ears and their noses and for fuck’s sake _hurry!_ ”

The roadie took off, and the guitarist raced back to the showers. He just hoped medical help would be in time.

~*~


	2. Chapter 2

_****_

Part Two

 

In the end, nobody slept.

Yoz spent the night cross legged in the middle of her bed, surrounded by books on demons and cursing under her breath, working her way through cigarette after cigarette until the room was thick with smoke and even her eyes were burning.

Henjo paced the flat, waiting for Kai to call him back and wondering what the fuck was going on. Every time he tried to sleep his mind was haunted by visions of blood and death, a strange coppery taste in his mouth and the cold strings of fear working their icy way along his spine. Now that Yoz had convinced him that at least part of her story was true, how much else was? Had someone really tried to kill him? Was he still in danger? Was Kai? Dirk? Dan?

He cursed and paced, paced and cursed and waited for the dawn.

Kai and Dirk sat in their hotel rooms and shivered. The paramedics may have given them the all clear, but neither wanted to think about the blinding pressure that had knocked them off their feet, that terrible flood of anger that had followed them both down into the darkness and left them feeling logy and stupid when they finally awoke. Whatever it was, it had passed as swiftly as it had come; the eyes of the medics had told their own story, of course. Called to attend two naked rockstars in the shower...?

Lay off whatever it is you’re taking, was the sage advice, passed on with a smirk.

Trouble was, apart from the odd drink neither one was taking anything.

They sat in the dark, trying not to think, and wondered what the hell was happening.

The demon was the most shocked of them all. It had felt the watcher, right enough. Felt it and chased it back to where it came from, hoping to kill whatever was on the other end of that slender thread - or render it insane. It had done it before and hadn’t expected trouble. But the thread went nowhere, or so it felt, and before it could disengage a pressure wave of power it had never encountered before - well, not this side of Hell, anyway - had slammed back through the link, knocking it back so hard it was almost dislodged from the man. The man was hurt, it knew; and so was the other man, the one its host had been riding at that very moment.

It licked its wounds in the silence of the man’s mind, and waited.

~*~

Still limping, although no longer needing both crutches to get around, Henjo made his way to the door, sandy eyed and sleepy. He’d rarely been so pleased to see dawn break over the city, and had been waiting for his strange little visitor of last night to return with something approaching fear. What was going to happen? When would--

“Wotcha Henjo,” grinned Yoz when he opened his door, “got any breakfast? I’m starved.”

“Coffee?”

“Don’t suppose you’ve got tea?”

“No.”

“Bugger. Coffee it is, then.”

She hopped up onto his counter again, accepting the mug he passed to her. He handed her a paper bag, which she peered into with some surprise before pulling out a pastry and munching on it cheerfully.

“I know the guys from the bakery down the road. I gave them a call this morning and had them send some stuff up,” he said in reply to her raised eyebrow.

She finished the pastry then brushed the crumbs from herself with a delicacy of movement that surprised him, crumpled the bag and tossed it into the waste bin without seeming to aim, scoring a direct hit and dropping him a sly wink as she did so. She took another swig of her coffee then lit a cigarette, eyeing him with a smile as she blew a series of smoke rings toward the ceiling.

“So,” she said.

“So,” he replied, then realised he didn’t know what to say. Nothing. Everything. How did she know? Why was this happening? What was actually going on if anything was, indeed, going on at all?

“Has Kai called you back?”

“No.”

She weaved her head from side to side. “I can’t get a handle on which one of them it is. It isn’t one of the youngsters; youth is, believe it or not, something that keeps them out. Too fresh, you see. The mind asks questions and the defences are too strong, except in the very young. But you, Kai, Dirk, Dan - you’ve seen a lot of shit, done a lot of shit. Sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, right?”

Henjo looked up at the ceiling, and tried to think of a diplomatic way to deny it.

“But Dan wasn’t around when you got pushed, so that’s him out of the running. He’s hanging out rather a lot with the keyboard kid - what’s his name?”

“Eero.”

“Right, him. Damn, and I used to think all you rockstars were so butch.”

Henjo snorted, making his way across the kitchen and refreshing her coffee before getting himself another one. He pushed it into her hands and raised his eyebrows, shaking his head at her when he saw her grin. She was teasing him. “That’s not how it is...”

“I know. Anyway, it’s one of the other two - Dirk or Kai. Which one did you notice behaving strangely, before you fell?”

Henjo shrugged. “Both of them. Dirk a little more, I think - but I can’t be sure.”

She swore, drumming her heels on the cabinet door and concentrating on her coffee, eyebrows furrowed.

“That settles it then,” she said after a minute or two’s contemplation, which had been scattered with dark muttering and many under-the-breath expletives that Henjo hadn’t understood, “we have to go there. The only way I can tell is by touching them, or at least being in the same room. Damn, I hate touching possession victims!”

“Why?”

“Because when you’re that close you don’t have much time to do something about it if the demon tries to rip your throat out.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Where are they at the moment?”

Henjo hobbled off to his desk, Yoz hopping down from the counter to follow him. He rummaged through a pile of papers and found the tour schedule, passing it to her without comment, just tapping the current destination with one long forefinger. She nodded, muttered some more; then cocked her head at him and grinned, wolfish.

“And they’re staying put for a day or so?”

“Yes. Two days off.”

“Perfect. Get your shit together,” she said with a grin, “we’re leaving.”

~*~

She took him to a part of Hamburg even he had never been to before; a dirty alleyway between high rise apartments, the stench of filth and despair hanging heavy in the air. Slums like this weren’t supposed to exist; Henjo thought they’d all been cleared. No clean, bright new future for the inhabitants of this place - all that was to be found here was misery and death. He could feel it in his bones, and he crowded closer to the little Magus, casting fearful glances over his shoulder. The skin between his shoulders prickled; it felt like malevolent eyes watched him, and he was half expecting a bullet to whistle out of the shadows at any moment. Yoz cocked her head at him.

“Scared?”

He frowned down at her. “Yes.”

“You should be. Now stay close, shut up, and we’ll be out of here in a jiff. Oh, and it would pay you not to look closely at anything once we’re inside.”

“Is that all?” he asked, beginning to feel a little faint, stomach roiling uneasily.

“No. Don’t look anyone but me in the eye - and don’t ask any fucking questions. Right?”

He nodded, slowly. “You’re the boss.”

“Damn right. Now come on. And don’t screw it up.”

Staying so close on her heels he looked like a long, gawky shadow Henjo followed her to a rusted steel door, bolted and padlocked and imposing. It didn’t look as though it had been opened in a century or more, but at a light touch of her fingers the bars and bolts fell away, the padlock crumbling to pieces under the sure press of her fingertips. It swung open with a protesting creak, making him shudder; if nobody had heard the awful noise he would be very surprised, but Yoz just shouldered her bag a little more securely and sauntered on. Henjo followed again, trying not to miss his footing in the narrow, dark corridor, shuffling past the unidentified rubbish that clustered around their feet. Some of it made unpleasant squelching noises, some of it rustled and squeaked and all of it stank; he was almost glad for the lack of light.

Almost.

They emerged into a room, low lit by candles and torches, walls hung with banners painted with scenes of Hell and ritual that he was glad he couldn’t see clearly. They stood on a sort of mezzanine, a raised platform that ran along one wall; what remained of a safety rail blocked some of his view of what was happening down in the room below them, and he focused on thinking about how he was going to get down those rickety stairs to the painted, damp concrete floor in order to avoid thinking about what he could see happening there.

Whatever it was - and he really didn’t want to see it, let alone understand it - it involved the sprawled carcass of a goat, the stench of its punctured bowels clear even from up here, a lot of chanting and, from the way some of the revellers were twitching on the floor, blood, sex, violence or quite possibly all three. Thick, sweet scented incense smoke lapped in lazy curls along the walls, extending dusky tendrils toward the pair of them on the shaky platform; the voices of the revellers below followed the smoke, until a booming command silenced them.

Without meaning to, Henjo looked at the black altar, trying with a certain amount of frightened desperation not to see the... things... it was decorated with, dangling limply in the half light and seeming all the more threatening for their very shapelessness. Was that a skull, scored and smashed almost beyond recognition? A hand? A hank of hair - and sweet Jesus, a tongue?

Yoz nudged him with her shoulder. “Don’t look, mate,” she murmured. “Just step back a bit and watch me; it’s going to be fine.”

She almost added, trust me, but thought that might be pushing things a little. Henjo, face greenish pale in the darkness, licked his lips and nodded, shuffling back into the shadows and staring at her as though his gaze were a lifeline. Sure, she felt uncomfortable bringing a normal to this place; in the company of anybody else the only way he’d see the inside of this room would be as a sacrifice. However, needs must, she thought as she watched the priest walk toward his filthy congregation, fat arms raised and face trembling with ecstasy. Half naked, rags around his waist hanging to his knees and barefoot in the muck and trash his body was painted and anointed, swirled with greasepaint that turned his skin into a vile representation of the bones buried beneath the bulk and dripping with blood and other, less identifiable substances. He sweated and shook, eyes rolling wildly; in the blank stare of daylight he would have appeared ridiculous, mad, but here in the gloom of a forgotten basement slum, surrounded by acolytes and stench and darkness... he was terrifying. Power rolled from him in shivering waves, and Henjo resisted the urge to cower and cry like a frightened child.

He began to chant, and Henjo’s ears popped as the pressure in the room shifted; he could feel things moving in the gloom, rubbing around his legs, sliding greasy-cold fingers across his mind. He began to shiver, and clenched his teeth so that nobody might hear them chattering.

He hoped that what Yoz wanted was worth this, because he was now so scared he felt like he was going to wet himself. She, on the other hand, just stood and watched the unfolding ritual below, seeming to be impervious to the darkness and the stench, the thick atmosphere and the invisible impossibilities twisting around them.

The fat man below them was screaming now, shaking a rattle made of bones and sweating, the thick white makeup on his twitching cheeks beginning to melt and run in streaks down his neck, his eyes rolling in their sockets and saliva streaming from the corners of his mouth, foam forming on his lips as he ranted to his followers. They raised their arms and moaned, swaying in ecstasy while he screamed on, and the atmosphere thickened still further.

Henjo thought he might go mad.

“You always were a showboater, Matata,” said Yoz, and her quiet, sardonic voice cut through the din like a knife.

The priest stopped, glaring into the shadows, every muscle tight under the layers of fat and sweat and grease. His followers stared too, eyes confused. A click echoed through the room, and the sound of Yoz inhaling on her cigarette to light it seemed to boom in the silence. From where he cowered, Henjo could see her face in profile; she wore a small smile, but her mismatched eyes were as hard and cold as anything he’d ever seen before.

The man began to growl, but she waved a hand and cut him off. “If it were up to me I’d let you carry on. Been a while since I’ve seen you work - and nothing changes, does it? Still the same old tricks.”

She began to descend the stairs, hands in her pockets, puffing on the cigarette still screwed firmly between her lips. Before he could move to follow her - stick close, she’d said, and although he really, really didn’t want to go down there he didn’t want to be alone even more - a voice brushed against his mind, and even though the method of delivery was unfamiliar the sense of Yoz was not, and he swayed back into the shadows again.

 _Stay there_ , she said.

The man began to scream at her, and for a moment Henjo was blinded by a thickening of the air, a press of stale darkness that swooped out of the corners and the rust-flecked girders that supported the sagging ceiling. He tried to watch Yoz, but the darkness grabbed him with dirty little talons, dragged his eyelids down and snickered in his ears. He began to hear a roaring in his head, and felt his knees give; he was going to pass out, he was sure, even though his heart was pounding hard enough to shake his body and knock against his ribs.

“Enough. Send the partiers away, Matata. I want to talk to you.”

Her voice cut through the fog and Henjo found himself on his knees in the muck, clutching his holdall and shivering. This was really too much, but at least she’d broken the spell - whatever it had been.

He screeched at her again, and Henjo heard the sound of a very firm slap. Cocking his head to peer between the bars of the railing he saw Yoz flick a finger at the man, and another blow landed on his cheek; his eyes widened, and Henjo recognised the expression in them. Fear. This ranter, this evil priest - he was afraid of Yoz?

Especially as - when she walked closer to the man, kicking acolytes out of the way - she was so much tinier than he. He looked at her, struggling to claw back some semblance of composure, and she simply stood and smoked. Looming over her he growled, the sound bubbling up from his chest and gurgling through his bloated throat, lifting the black lips and fluttering them over big yellow teeth. Yoz didn’t appear impressed; she cocked an eyebrow at him, and with a sharp command from him the revellers fled, vanishing under the drapes and wallhangings, banging doors unseen in the darkness. The silence grew thicker for a moment.

“I will kill you,” the priest mumbled, voice like gravel at the bottom of a drum, and Yoz laughed.

“Not this week, my friend. And it isn’t you I need, just Sharufa...”

The priest flinched, his eyes rolling and flashing white in his mottled black face. “You cannot reach her except--”

“You’re full of shit, Matata. I can touch her whenever I want to. Now get the fuck out of my way before I hurt you.”

Henjo almost screamed when a voice spoke beside him, light and full of amusement.

“My brother,” it said, and he squeaked and twitched, looking up to see a small, slim black girl watching him with a sparkle in her eyes, “is not accustomed to being bested.”

Henjo didn’t know what to say, just stared at the girl with his mouth open. She gave a chuckle, a floating, silvery laugh that sounded horribly out of place in this grim dungeon. Offering him her hand, he let her help him up; her grip was firm, but did feel a little... strange. Cooler than he expected, harder. Still, who knew what sort of a person she really was? Nothing in this chamber of horrors was anything like he expected, and he was quite sure that very little was exactly as it appeared. Including her.

Shorter than him, anyway, he thought as he looked down at her. She was wrapped in a bright outfit, sunny African style print cradling a body not yet out of adolescence, curves just beginning to bloom beneath the wrap. Her fine boned face was alight with gentle humour, and rather reminded him of carvings he’d seen in museums; thoughts of ancient princesses flickered through his memory before he shook himself, bringing his mind back to the vileness of his current situation. She squeezed his hand, a gesture meant to reassure but there was that strangeness again--

“Come along,” she said with a smile, and began to lead the bemused guitarist down the rickety stairs. He opened his mouth to protest, then shut it with a snap; he’d caught a quick glimpse of her face in profile and perhaps it was a trick of the flickering candles, the still-swirling smoke or his frightened and overtaxed imagination but for just a fleeting instant he hadn’t been looking at a young woman, but a worn skull.

The priest shrieked when he set eyes on the pair, and Henjo hesitated. Yoz raised a hand, beckoned him closer without taking her eyes from her opponent.

“Who is this? You cannot bring one into my sanctum _I will not permit--!”_

Henjo stopped. Whatever was going on he’d had enough. This bastard was huge, and he was frightened. He wanted out. Yoz chuckled.

“You’re scaring him, Matata. Now fuck off, there’s a good lad....”

The priest lunged at her with his rattle, and all Yoz did was raise her palm toward him. That was all, just a simple gesture; the result, however, made Henjo begin to doubt his very sanity. The priest, eyes wild, lips skinned back from his blood-flecked teeth like a mad dog, was thrown backward as though he’d just crashed into a solid barrier; he fell to the floor and scuffled in the filth, raking it with his nails and screaming through his nose, bubbling in agony. He crawled to Yoz’ feet, pushing a layer of dirt and blood before him, reduced to animal noises. Yoz used the toe of her boot under his chin to tip his face up, and Henjo couldn’t hold it any longer.

He took three paces toward the wall, and threw up.

Supporting himself on one hand he coughed and spat, wiping tearing eyes with the back of his hand and trying to get the shaking under control. That simple gesture made by the Mage had not only smashed the fat man’s nose but torn up one side of his face, ripping an eyelid and raking a great score across the eyeball underneath. Blood and fluids leaked down the crushed side, and the other eye rolled sightless and distressed from whatever she’d done to him.

A thudding noise came to his ears, and after one final cough he turned to see what was going on. Yoz was kicking the fat man around the floor, pacing him as he tried to escape, then drawing back a boot and planting it as hard as she could in whatever part of his body was nearest.

“Yoz!”

She looked at him. “Ready to go, Hen?”

He stared at her in utter disbelief, then turned to the slim young girl beside her. “He’s your brother! Aren’t you going to try and stop her?”

“ _Stop_ her?” asked the girl, and then she laughed. It was quite possibly the most unpleasant sound he’d ever heard; the rustling in the walls began again, and even the broken, mewling lump on the floor stilled in terror. The girl looked at Yoz, and she had no eyes; just deep, bloodied caverns where those lively black orbs had sparkled at him so merrily such a short time before. “Stop her? It is only her intervention that is stopping me killing him before you now, and taking his soul to Hell!”

Henjo blinked, and Yoz held out her hand. “Sorry mate,” she said with a shrug, “I didn’t think it was going to get this messy. I needed a lot of power in a hurry, so--”

 

“So you came to my houngan brother, to use his pet Loa, no? To harness his watcher in Hell. Would your companion be so sympathetic to my dear brother if he knew how powerful, honoured, blessed Matata had created his watcher, his petitioner to the Lords of Damnation? Have you told him all, or nothing?”

“Enough, Sharufa,” said Yoz, squeezing Henjo’s hand and pulling him in behind her. “You know what I need.”

“And you know what I want.”

“I do. And I can’t. Not right now.”

“So you leave me to my brother’s control. You use me like he does.”

Yoz hissed through her teeth, and Henjo bent to whisper in her ear. “What the fuck is going on? Can we go now, please?”

“You cannot go until I let you go,” snapped the younger woman, and Henjo was relieved to see that now he had firm hold of the Mage’s hand she just looked like an angry teenager. Some of the things he’d been beginning to see had been decidedly unnerving.

“I can give you three days.”

“Three days? I have had forty years of this!”

Yoz looped her arm around Henjo’s waist and bared her teeth at the girl, tone savage. “I could take you. I could own you. Or I could lock you in the deepest hole of Hell and make sure you never get out. Or you can have three days.”

The girl slumped, and buried her face in her hands. Yoz’ voice was quieter when she spoke again, almost compassionate.

“Who knows? Maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe, some time in those three days, somebody will see that he’s powerless. Maybe they’ll kill him. Maybe you’ll find a way.”

The three of them stood that way for a frozen moment, Henjo wishing he’d never agreed to come with her, Sharufa weeping into her hands, slim shoulders shaking and Yoz... Yoz just still, waiting. The crocodile on the banks of the stream, the snake under the rock, the hawk in the sky. Henjo shuffled closer to her; he’d seen enough during his years on the road that he definitely wanted to side with the predator.

“Sharufa,” said the Mage, “now.”

She held out her free hand, and the sobbing girl clasped it in both of hers. Yoz nodded, and murmured something to her in a language he didn’t recognise; she tilted her head up and smiled, the expression so sweet that it quite took his breath away. Yoz tightened her arm around his waist.

“Hold on tight, shut your eyes, and try not to puke on me, OK?”

He blinked at her. She winked at him, then turned to face the shivering lump that had been such a powerful figure when they’d first arrived.

“Matata, hear me. See true power, and fear it. And if I ever have cause to come to you again...” her voice trailed away, and she laughed at him. “Well. Just pray that I don’t. Hide from me, Matata. Because I can be more terrible than anything you’ve ever imagined - and I know you’ve got a real good imagination.” She turned back to the young woman. “Now,” she said, and Henjo’s world exploded.

~*~

When he came round he’d been propped against a wall with his head hanging between his knees. It was cold, and the alley smelt of piss, stale beer and rotten food; apart from that, it was just an alley. The one thing he could be sure of, however, was that it was neither the alley they had begun from nor the hideous room they had just been in. Other than that he had no idea.

“Feeling better, chap?” asked a familiar voice, and he wobbled his head up to glare at Yoz, seated cross legged on top of a dumpster and grinning at him.

He let his head drop again. “What happened in there?” he asked, not really expecting an answer. Feet thumped to the ashphalt, and a familiar set of boots and knees came into view; she was crouched by his head, and the hand she ran through his hair was gentle.

“I’m truly sorry you had to see all that. But I needed a lot of power in a hurry, and that was the best place to get it.”

“Voodoo? In Hamburg?”

Yoz’ snort of amusement was cold, but soft. “Yeah, even there. Every city has its dark underbelly, my friend, and every city has its magic. And every city has one bastard who’s a bigger bastard than all the rest, who calls the shots and controls everything even remotely... magic... that happens there. Matata came in as an illegal immigrant, just a teenager but already one of the most powerful houngan there’s ever been; if he wasn’t so keen on self indulgence he’d be really dangerous. As it is, he’s a big fish in a little pond. You know the type.”

Guilt. It had to be guilt making her talk like this; Yoz was cagey at the best of times, but right now the words were almost tumbling out of her. Henjo tipped his head, and tried to look more tired than he was; not too hard, because it felt as though he’d been run over by a truck, but still. He didn’t have the Hansen charm, but he was going to give it a damn good go.

He hooded his eyes, and let his fear show in his face. “Who,” he asked, moistening dry lips, “was the girl?”

Yoz sighed, and looked away. “We ought to be going. The demon’s going to twig that we’re--”

His hand on her arm stopped her. “She was dead, wasn’t she?”

The Mage pulled a face. “And more than dead. She’s the source of his power, his link to the Lords of Hell. She was his sister. He killed her, and prepared the body very very carefully; he owns her soul. Completely. Through her he can gather more power than even he knows - she knows, but she won’t tell him unless he asks. Unsurprisingly, she hates him.”

Henjo sighed, and let his head droop again. “She was so young,” he said sadly, and missed the flicker of pain that passed over Yoz’ face.

“Yeah. Come on.”

Her hands, he decided as she hauled him to his feet and steadied him, were altogether too damn hard for a woman. She nodded at him, patted his shoulder and turned to go; he grabbed her shoulder and turned her back round to face him, staring down into her face with a frown.

“Can’t you help her? Set her free?”

Yoz looked away. “I could.”

“But you won’t.”

“No. I’ve given her three days.”

“Why won’t you help her?”

“Because I might need her again.”

She pulled away from him and started toward the brightly lit mouth of the alley. Henjo grabbed his bag and hobbled after her, anger beginning to fizz.

“That’s disgusting! Yoz! Wait!”

She turned, and when he opened his mouth to speak again she grabbed him by the front of his jacket and pushed him against the wall, her hair dancing around her head as energy flared and crackled around her in a nimbus of nervous electricity. The discharge whispered along his chest, tickled his ribs and made him widen his eyes; he’d pushed her, and for a moment he wondered if he’d gone too far.

“Disgusting? Henjo, you have no idea just what we’re dealing with here - I need to be ready to face a demon. A _demon_. You want to know what that’s capable of?”

He opened his mouth, closing it again when she dropped him and turned away, shouldering her bag and turning to face him again. Her voice, when she spoke again, was softer but no less cutting.

“What that thing is capable of... it makes a magician who raped and murdered his own fourteen year old virgin sister, who ate her heart and eyes to own her soul, who has turned every piece of flesh from her body into a totem... it makes him seem insignificant. I’m not asking you to understand. But this is my world, Henjo. Don’t judge it.”

He followed her to the mouth of the alley without another word, and when he put his arm around her shoulder she didn’t resist it, but leaned into his side and heaved a great gust of a sigh. He patted her shoulder and let her go; words would have been wasted, so he didn’t even try. When she stepped away from him he let his arm fall, and even tried to smile at her.

“So,” he said, aiming for a light tone and failing, “where are we?”

She snorted. “Exactly where we need to be. This building here,” and she slapped it, “contains the rest of your band. The buses are parked round the back. And Henjo?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks.”

He shrugged. “You think I’m bad, you wait until you meet Kai. He’ll bounce and ask questions and drive you crazy. Just do me a favour?”

“What?”

“Don’t kill him.”

“I’ll try not to,” she said with a grin, and set off round the corner with a very tired and confused Henjo in her wake. He had a lot to think about, that was for sure; he just hoped he’d get some time to do just that, at some point before all this was over.

~*~

They walked past the silent reception desk, Henjo still wondering how she’d strolled straight through a locked door, the rubber tip to his crutch making a quiet thump-squeak across the faux marble of the floor. He cleared his throat, hoping she’d stop and explain, but instead she just veered round to the side of the reception desk, hopped up onto it and dropped down the other side, rummaging underneath for the large book containing resident’s details. Henjo squeaked.

“You can’t do that!”

She winked at him. “Yes I can. It’s an emergency.”

“What emergency?”

She ran her finger down the entries. “Gotta love Eastern Europe. Still using books and pens and shit. I bet I could find a card index if I rummaged. What?”

“I said, what emergency?”

“We haven’t got a room.”

“So...”

“We need one. Next to Kai’s. Which means getting rid of the person who already has that room, which would be number...” she broke off and muttered for a few moments, then picked up the phone and made a call, chattering away in a language he didn’t recognise for a few moments. A few more explosive bursts and she hung up, tapping her fingers on the desk before picking the phone up again and speaking to somebody else, shading her voice to sound just different enough that you would swear it had been two people speaking. Putting the phone down with a decisive click she leaned on the desk and wriggled her eyebrows at Henjo.

“Take a seat, mate, they won’t be long.”

“But--”

“Don’t ask. You might not like the answer.”

He stared at her, then turned and hobbled away to sink into a plush sofa behind a potted palm. At least this way if the local police turned up he might escape notice. Ten minutes passed, and a very flustered man in a business suit charged out of the lift, dragging a suitcase behind him and flinging his key across the desk to Yoz as he went. She tipped a finger at him, and grinned as he made a break for the door, crashing through it and running off down the street, the sound of his departure fading behind him.

Henjo thump-squeaked his way across the floor to her, and glared at her as she flipped herself back across the desk waving the key in triumph.

“Did you just steal that room?”

“Hard to steal a whole hotel room, mate.”

“You know what I mean. And where was he going?”

They caught the lift, Yoz settling her bag more comfortably on her shoulder and still grinning at him. “He’s going to the airport. And don’t feel too sorry for him; he habitually cheats on his wife with the youngest-looking rent boys he can find, and he swindles his customers. You don’t think I’d cheat an honest man, do you?”

He didn’t know what to say, just followed her to the vacated room. She poked her head round the door, and pulled a face; he wasn’t close enough to catch the words she whispered, but he got an impression of movement from the room before she firmly closed the door. She cocked her head at him, and then her expression sobered.

“Look, this could get nasty. But I’ll say again what I said back at your place; I don’t like demons, but I do like musicians. I’ll do my very best to keep you all alive and whole and sane, but I can’t make any promises. If it all starts going to shit I’ll try my hardest to get you out. But if I tell you to run, or get out, don’t stand there and argue or you’ll be dead before you know it. Understand?”

Henjo, too tired to care by now, just nodded. She took his shoulders, leaned him against the wall, and moved to the door; calling up a ball of coruscating energy in one hand, she used the other to do something to the lock, and push the door open. Henjo waited, his back prickling with tension, wondering what was going to happen - would he hear screaming, would there be sulphur and hellfire?

Apparently not.

What there would be, however, was Yoz grabbing his arm and dragging him into the room, a light touch on his lips urging him to silence.

“Can you feel anything different?” she murmured, her voice so quiet he couldn’t be sure he’d even heard it. He strained every sense, but no - nothing felt out of the ordinary here. Just the sounds of Kai sleeping, alone. Henjo sighed, louder than he meant to, as the relief washed through him.

“Henjo?”

The voice was sleepy, a little slurred. Yoz stiffened, fingers digging into his arm like claws. Bedclothes rustled, and in the dim shadows of the room a darker bulk sat up in the bed and rubbed its eyes.

“Hen? That you?”

The light clicked on, and Henjo couldn’t suppress a grin. Kai blinked in surprise, then a very familiar, impish smile creased his features.

“What are you doing here?”

“Surprise,” he managed, looking around for Yoz in order to introduce the pair. A squeak from the bed dragged his attention back; to his horror, Yoz had Kai bent backwards in a headlock, arms trapped behind him, a wicked looking black bladed knife held to his throat. He rolled his eyes at Henjo, who made to step forward. A swift glance from Yoz - promising instant mayhem and death if he came closer - stopped him dead in his tracks.

“Henjo,” said Kai from between his teeth, making a tiny noise of pain when Yoz dug the blade into the soft skin of his throat, drawing a tiny bead of blood. Henjo watched it crawl down his neck, slowing to a halt somewhere around his collarbone. He felt cold, but couldn’t seem to summon the strength to move or speak. It had all been too much - promises and soft words, then terror and death and now this?

She tightened her grip on Kai and leaned in to touch her face to his neck, looking for all the world as though she were going to bite him. Despite everything, Henjo felt a tiny bit impressed; Kai might be short, but he was incredibly strong. For her to be able to pin him like that took... well, it took more than he’d thought she had, anyway.

She took a deep breath, licked at the side of Kai’s neck then dropped him, leaping away from him in a single fluid movement. Kai dropped forward, striking out with his fist as he moved; the blow went wide, only causing him to thump the wall with a grunt of pain. Yoz came to a halt by the door, wiping the blade of the knife on her sleeve and watching both men carefully.

“He’s clean.”

Henjo was so relieved that his legs felt weak. In fact, everything felt weak, and before he knew it he was sitting on the floor, staring at the carpet between his knees. He seemed to be doing a lot of that, lately.

But at least this time there was Kai, sliding an arm around his shoulders and sitting him up, the familiar voice soothing and those strong hands grasping his; the questions weren’t quite so welcome but he’d get to that. In a minute. When he felt better. When he could do something other than bury his head in Kai’s naked shoulder and breathe in his scent, grip his hands and be relieved that he was alive. His mind threw up an image of the slaughtered goat from the basement, and put Kai’s body in its place. Split open and bled out, lifeless eyes staring at nothing and beginning to wrinkle as they dried. Stench of offal and waste leaking from torn guts, coppery-wet-metallic tang of blood contaminating every breath--

“Gonna be sick,” he growled, and Kai managed to manhandle him to the bathroom before that happened. Engrossed as he was in dry heaving - his breakfast long gone - he missed the look Kai gave Yoz, leaning on the frame of the bathroom door and watching the scene without comment.

“He’s had a tough day,” she said dryly.

“So I see,” snapped Kai, still glaring at her. Yoz snorted, eyeing him with a raised eyebrow. Propping Henjo carefully against the side of the toilet and making sure he wasn’t about to collapse Kai rose, advancing on her with fists clenched.

“I don’t know who the fuck you are, but if you ever do that to him again--”

Yoz backed up, keeping a couple of feet between herself and the enraged frontman. He cursed her, lifted a finger to wag in her face, threatened to call security, threatened to kill her himself - which statement was met by a sardonic smirk - until she finally shook her head and stepped in to him, meeting his furious expression with one that was cool and controlled - and very, very dangerous. Kai froze, never having seen her move. One moment she’d been backing up, and the next she was in his face, mismatched eyes freezing him with a look as cold as space itself.

“Something weird happened yesterday, didn’t it?”

He blinked at her.

“I know it did. And I know,” she continued, lifting one hand to touch his temple, “that it scared you. But what’s scared you more is Dirk’s reaction, am I right?”

“Who are you?” he whispered, real fear appearing in his eyes for the first time. Yoz smiled. She had to admire a guy that, after having been pinned to his bed with a knife to his throat, could still think quickly enough to keep up with her. Impressive.

“My name is Yoz,” she told him, “and you, friend, have a problem. A demon in your friend that’s been killing people.”

Kai opened his mouth to speak, but Henjo beat him to it.

“Believe it, Kai,” he said, sounding tired, “it’s true. I’ve seen shit not even you would believe...” his voice trailed off and he wandered across to sit heavily on the bed, burying his face in his hands. Kai looked at him, then turned back to Yoz with a snort.

“OK.”

There was a pause.

Yoz raised an eyebrow. “That’s it? No questions?”

“Henjo’s convinced. That’s good enough for me - if you’ve persuaded that sceptical sonofabitch then there must be something to what you say. Plus, I’ve heard of you.”

She blinked.

“Henjo? Is he always like this?”

“No,” came the muffled reply, “usually it takes a sledgehammer to convince him.”

“No Hen, that’s you,” sighed Kai, going across to sit beside his friend, rubbing his back.

She took a moment to reshuffle her mental processes; for all that she protested about ‘normals’ wanting to ask a bazillion questions, at least the process gave her time to think of a next move while she ducked giving them a straight answer. Now, however--

“So what’s the plan?” asked Kai, quietly, “only we had the police here yesterday, asking about a fan that’s gone missing.”

“She’s dead,” said Yoz absently, pacing the room and twitching the curtain aside, looking for any sign of dawn.

“How can you know--” began Kai sharply, but Henjo cut him off.

“Don’t ask. If she says she’s dead, it’s true.”

More silence.

“Is Dirk in his room?” asked Henjo quietly, and Kai shrugged.

“I guess so.”

Henjo looked at Yoz, and she nodded slowly. “Room number?”

Kai gave it to her.

“Right then. You two stay here.”

“Why, where are you going?”

She eyed the redhead. “I am going,” she told him, pulling a slightly larger knife from her sleeve, “to see if I can find your demon.”

And with that, she was gone.

~*~


	3. Chapter 3

_****_

Part Three

 

Kai put his arms around Henjo and the two sat close, feeling the warmth of each other’s bodies and listening to their breathing, Henjo closing his eyes and leaning into the strong arms that held him tight. All the worry, the fear, the pain - it all became so insignificant when he was being held like this. He was home, really.

“Are you OK, Hen? Truly?” asked Kai, and Henjo turned to nuzzle his face into his neck, letting out his breath in a long sigh that made Kai shudder.

“Truly? No. But,” he replied, rubbing his face on Kai’s shoulder, “if she’s right...”

“If? You’re not sure?”

Henjo looked miserable. “Kai, it’s all so impossible that--”

The slam of the door opening made them both jump, Kai coming to his feet and getting between a very angry Yoz and Henjo. She stopped right in front of him and snorted, cocking her head when she realised that the two were almost eye-to-eye, barely half an inch in difference between their heights.

“You’re as tiny as Bruce, mate.”

Kai blushed, fighting the embarrassment down with a grimace. “Fuck that. What’s happening?”

She shrugged, turning away from him and staring at the closed door, biting her lip and fidgeting. “He’s gone. I don’t know if he’s legged it because he felt me arrive, or he’s out hunting. Only one way to find out - but I’d like you guys in a safe place before I go looking.”

“You’re leaving us here?” asked Henjo, rising to stand behind Kai, putting a hand on his shoulder and rubbing at it, absently. Yoz spotted the gesture and snorted, raising one eyebrow.

“Not if I can help it. And there’s only one place I can think of to put you all where it--”

“Dirk,” said Kai, voice firm.

“--it can’t reach you. Give me a minute and then come next door, would you? Get the kids.”

“They’re not--” snapped Kai, biting his words off when he realised he was talking to thin air. “Where’d she go?”

Henjo shrugged. “I don’t want to think about it. Let’s get the boys...”

“Henjo...”

“She’s right and you know it.”

Grumbling, Kai yanked on a pair of jeans and padded barefoot down the corridor, hammering on doors and moving on. When he came to the last one he waited, grinning when Dan poked his head out, tousled and sleepy.

“Whassup?”

“Band meeting. My room. C’mon. Bring Eero with you.”

Henjo followed Kai back down the corridor, turning and shrugging at the startled drummer but still unable to stifle a snort of amusement when he - rather sheepishly - emerged from the room with an equally sleepy young keyboardist behind him, fingers twined together. Kai hammered for a bit longer on the first door he’d tried, finally shouting for Kasperi to get his ass out of bed, already.

The door cracked open and sleepy blue eyes regarded Kai, sweat-soaked hair falling around them. A woman’s voice muttered in the background, and Kai rolled his own eyes with exasperation before seizing the youth by one ear and giving it a tug.

“Band meeting, my room, five minutes, dump the groupie. Got it?”

Grumbling, Kai turned back to Henjo who just arched an eyebrow.

“Kids,” they said together, and headed back to his room to wait.

~*~

In the meantime, Yoz had closed herself in the hotel room she’d cleared and stood in the middle of it, chewing her lip. Her room, on the whole, didn’t like strangers. And with all the crap she’d accumulated in there over the years - some of it dangerous - how much trouble could they get themselves into? Yes, strangers had been in there before - the place had even asked for help, once, when she’d been held captive and hadn’t thought she was going to survive - but it didn’t exactly relish it. And while she was off hunting demons who knew what Kai would be getting up to?

Because although the gentle Henjo and the others might do as they were told and keep their hands to themselves, Kai most certainly wouldn’t.

She rummaged in her pocket, pulled out the cool globe that meant the world to her, and spoke the words.

~*~

Kai paced his room, watched by the rest of his band, trying to think of what to tell them. Henjo was relaxed on the bed, back against the headboard, long fingers laced together over his stomach. Dan and Eero had curled up on the sofa, the young Finn fast asleep once more with his head buried in Dan’s chest. Kasperi leaned in a corner with his arms folded and wearing a pout, looking none too pleased to be dragged from his activities. Eventually, he was the one who cleared his throat and asked the question neither Kai nor Henjo wanted to answer.

“Where’s Dirk?”

Kai stopped pacing. “We don’t know.”

“Maybe,” sighed Dan, “he’s gone out for a beer? Or picked up a groupie. Or something.”

Kai looked at Henjo and raised his eyebrows. Put like that, in a brightly lit hotel room at two in the morning with his friends around him it seemed more than reasonable. Demons? No matter what Henjo had seen - or thought he’d seen - was it really possible that solid, sensible Dirk could be out there killing people and not just trying to get laid?

“Is that what this is all about?” asked Kasperi, covering his mouth as he yawned. “Dirk?”

“Sort of,” said Henjo, reluctantly. Kai rubbed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“You remember when Dirk and I... collapsed the other night?”

Kasperi snorted, and Dan rolled his eyes. Henjo, having been briefed on what had happened by Yoz, just curled his lip in a half smile. He knew exactly what they’d been up to when she surprised the demon, and couldn’t say he was entirely happy about it - even more so now he knew what had been riding in Dirk’s head at the time.

“Too much beer,” rumbled Dan with a raised eyebrow, and Eero stirred on his chest, cracking one grey-blue eye open and smiling slowly.

“No such thing.”

“There is at his age.”

“It was not,” said Kai through gritted teeth, “too much beer. It was--”

“A demon. Evening boys, my name is Yoz and you,” she smiled, sketching a quick bow to them, “are going to shut the fuck up and listen for a few minutes.”

~*~

The conversation followed the usual lines, and Yoz was ready to tear her hair out in about half the usual time, even with Kai and Henjo helping her along. Dan flat out didn’t believe her, the two Finns were sceptical and Kai just wanted to go next door and see what she was talking about. She’d had to - reluctantly - explain about her room when she’d pointed out that it was just too dangerous for her to go off hunting the demon and leaving them alone; given time, she could protect them but the demon had fed in this city once already, the police were becoming suspicious and Dirk’s absence boded ill for someone, somewhere. It appeared that some smart cove amongst law enforcement had figured out that, with the exception of the derelict drifters, all the victims had one thing and one thing only in common.

Their taste in music.

And considering that said derelicts tended to be found near either venues, hotels the band had used or rest stops where the bus had parked they fitted the pattern too. Thus far the band weren’t under suspicion but it could only be a matter of time.

Eero had woken up now, even though he was still curled into Dan’s side. “But if Dirk is killing people,” he said, eyes wide, “shouldn’t we turn him over to the police?”

“No,” snapped Kai and Henjo together. Kai had dropped to sit on the end of the bed, wriggling back until Henjo’s legs stretched alongside his own. Kasperi had plopped down beside it, still pouting over the lost time with his willing groupie.

“So what I need now,” explained Yoz through her teeth, “is for you guys to sit tight next door while I do some--”

“No,” said Kai.

Yoz flung her arms in the air. “Fine. Come on, entertain me. Tell me why you don’t want your people kept safe while I go out and take a few risks to save another one, eh? Go on, this should be pretty fucking funny.”

Henjo reached for Kai, but missed grabbing his arm by the merest margin. Kai bounced up to the Magus and the pair stared at each other, nose to nose and both vibrating with anger. The implication that Kai would willingly put his people - as she had put it - in danger just to satisfy his own ego had pushed a button that none of them had really realised was there; but there it was, hiding right out in plain sight. Not only was he the frontman, not only was it his band but they were all, according to Kai and seen immediately by Yoz, very much _his_ people. He felt responsible for them, cared for and about them and her words had pushed him just a little further than any of them had ever seen him pushed before.

“You come in here with nothing but a bunch of crazy stories, scaring my friends and threatening us? Well, fuck you! I’m not doing anything on just the word of a crazy woman and--”

He shut up when Yoz held up one hand, the palm flat toward his face, scowling at him. “Crazy, huh? Look.”

“Yoz, no!”

Henjo was struggling to his feet, white faced. He remembered what a similar gesture had done to the Voodoo priest in the dirty basement, and wanted to try and stop her doing the same thing to Kai. She just levelled the index finger of her other hand at him, effectively pinning him in place.

“Sit still, skinny boy. I want him to see just why I’m here. Sit!”

Everyone was on their feet now, staring in horror at Kai who was beginning to sweat and tremble, small whimpering noises coming from his mouth as he watched whatever she had put in front of his eyes. Dan took a pace forward, growling, when he began to make noises like a trapped bird, his heart beating so hard the pulse was obvious in his chest. Tendons stood out on his neck, and his eyes were wide; he tried to look away, but was squirming in the grasp of something that held him too tight to allow escape.

“Yoz!” yelped Henjo, and with a hiss she balled her fist and let him drop, watching him impassively as he stumbled to the bed and curled up in Henjo’s lap, shaking. The other three watched in horrified silence as Henjo stroked his hair and rubbed small circles on his back, murmuring soothing noises under his breath. Yoz continued to stare until Kai lifted his gaze, and then she cocked an eyebrow.

“Dirk is doing... doing... that?”

She nodded.

“Fine. Fine. Whatever you need to do. But,” he said sharply, when she began to turn away, “I’m coming with you.”

~*~

Deciding that if she was going to get anything done before daybreak she was going to have to give in - it appeared that Kai was as stubborn as he was short - she towed the five men next door, leading them into her room and waving them to explore while she perched on the edge of her desk and watched them. She could feel the atmosphere change when they entered; the temperature dropped, and the air took on a slight scent of vinegar.

“Whoah,” said Dan, walking toward the fire and looking up at the vaulted ceiling with wonder. Henjo hobbled over to the desk, leaning on it and looking more tired than ever.

“It hates us, doesn’t it?” he said, quietly, looking over his shoulder with a frown. Yoz cocked her head at him.

“Nah. It’s just a bit nervous of strangers.”

“It seems weird to be talking about a room being, well, alive.”

She shrugged one shoulder, watching the Finns having a heated discussion to one side of the fireplace. From what she could understand it was running roughly along the lines of ‘I told you so’, ‘did not’, ‘did too’, and so on and so forth. Dan had vanished behind a bookshelf, and Kai was inspecting some carvings on the panelling. “Not so strange. Haven’t you ever walked into an empty house and felt an atmosphere? Or a venue and got a vibe from it before the crowd even began to arrive?”

“Well, yeah. But that’s different - isn’t it?”

She rocked back, and lit a cigarette with a wink. “Is it? You tell me.”

He gave her a look down his nose. “You mean all buildings are alive?”

“Everything’s alive, Henjo. Everything.”

He hobbled off to find Dan, muttering under his breath about weird women and magic and how he hoped never to get involved with either ever again. She chuckled and smoked, eyeing the boys and sending sympathetic thoughts to her room, which she could mentally feel was almost trembling under the assault of so much inspection.

Kai approached, eyes shining as he skimmed a hand across the wall behind her desk. “This,” he said with a grin, brown eyes dancing with happiness, “is fantastic! It’s incredible - it’s in a whole ‘nother universe, you say? Beautiful!”

And he wandered off, petting the walls and talking to himself - or perhaps to his surroundings. She felt the room watching him closely, and snorted under her breath; it seemed to like Kai. Perhaps it was the praise, or maybe it was the gentle touching, or maybe it was simply that he glowed so bright he even fascinated the lonely inhabitant of a tiny bubble of space-time. She hooded her eyes, checking Kai out with what she sometimes referred to as her Other sight, and shook her head with amusement.

Whatever he might have turned his hand to, this man would have succeeded at it. His sheer determination and energy burst from his soul in a blue-white glow that was almost blinding; everybody had an aura, if you knew how to look, but some people positively shone. He had a light inside of him, a constant nuclear inferno that kept him going no matter what; you could knock him down as often as you liked, kick him and hurt him but he’d keep getting up, keep bouncing back.

He would be the demon’s next target. And Yoz was almost afraid to think what it could do with energy like that at its disposal.

Voices from the next partition over attracted her attention, and she wandered round to see what was going on. Dan was stretched out on the bed - _her_ bed - with his pretty Finn, tickling the solemn expression away; Kasperi had found a book and was paging through it, wide eyed, and Kai had crouched beside her dragon lamp, staring into its eyes and making delighted, happy noises. Henjo was leaning in the corner, watching his friend with an indulgent smile on his face. It seemed that Kai’s bouncing enthusiasm wasn’t surprising him in the slightest.

 

Her room, she could feel, was warming to them. Kai’s utter adoration had won it over, and Dan’s care for Eero; Kasperi’s fascination and willingness to be guided - the dangerous books were on the higher shelves and the room had hidden the steps - and Henjo’s sadness at its fear had touched it, too. She backed around the corner, walked to the nearest patch of stone and patted it.

“You old softy,” she murmured, touching its awareness with her mind. “So, would you look after them for me?”

The temperature rose to its normal level, the fire burning clear gold again, and the slightly acrid smell was replaced with the usual warm mix of old leather, dusty books and fresh cut pine from the log basket all mingling together to give a comfortable, well used feeling like an old study.

“Thank you,” she murmured, giving it another pat before heading round to speak to the men and lay out a few ground rules.

~*~

In the end, she managed to persuade Dan, Eero and Kasperi to stay in the room. Kai insisted on staying with her, and where Kai went Henjo went - although she did manage to get him to agree that if they had to leave the hotel to hunt Dirk and his unwelcome guest he would stay in the room with the others. In the meantime they had returned to base reality, called room service and sent Henjo in with food for the others. He hobbled off, still leaning heavily on one crutch while he pushed the little cart over the threshold that separated one universe from another.

Yoz waited until the door had drifted closed behind him, then with a wink at Kai extended her palm and spoke a short string of syllables.

Kai squeaked and shut his eyes. He hoped nothing as drastic was happening to those inside the room, because watching it fold into itself from the outside made his eyeballs want to crawl back into his skull. He couldn’t even begin to describe how it - and he also didn’t know how he could perceive more than just the flat door - sucked its own bulk into the tiny, oily little marble that Yoz strolled forward and picked up from the floor, turning to him with a wry smile.

“Are they,” he said, swallowing down the bizarre motion sickness that had afflicted him while watching the reverse-fractal effect, “OK in there?”

Yoz held the marble up between thumb and forefinger and chuckled. “I could go into a long discussion about how this is not the actual place but a mere hyper-dimensional extrusion into our universe of the possibility of existence of--”

“Forget I asked.”

“In short, they’re fine. But the door is locked, they can’t get out, and Henjo is going to be pissed at you when we go back in there.”

“Why’d you lock him in there, then?”

She snorted at Kai and clapped him on the shoulder, stuffing the marble back into the recesses of her grubby leather jacket. “Because it was written all over the front of your mind in big red letters that you didn’t want him doing anything dangerous. And trust me, this is going to be dangerous. If I tell you to run I mean fast - not hobble away as best you can.”

Kai nodded thoughtfully. “I do not want Henjo getting hurt.”

“More hurt.”

“Thank you for reminding me.”

“You’re welcome. Now come on, I’ve got a demon to chase...”

Kai’s eyes lit up. “How? Are we leaving the hotel? Is there going to be magic? How will you do it - can I help? Or is it going to be secret and if it is can I--”

Yoz groaned and pinched the bridge of her nose. Henjo had warned her he’d be like this. Shaking her head, she went back into his room, trying her best to tune out the excited chattering following along behind her.

~*~

Henjo parked the cart. “Food. Come on, guys.”

Kasperi levered himself out of the sofa that had appeared by the fire, carefully marking his place in the book he was reading with a scrap of parchment. “Good. I am starved...”

Henjo stared at the sofa, eyes puzzled. “That wasn’t here before, was it?”

Dan and Eero appeared around the corner, nudging him to one side while they had a look at what had been ordered. “No,” said Dan, his words muffled by a mouthful of pizza, “but we said that it would be nice to have somewhere else to sit and there it was. I think the place likes us.”

“Well, you guys have fun here,” replied Henjo with a sigh, “I’m going to keep Kai company while she tries to find the demon.”

“Dirk,” said Kasperi firmly, frowning. Henjo shrugged.

“Whatever. We’ll be back, OK?” and so saying, he settled his crutch more firmly on his arm and hobbled to the door, giving the elaborate bronze ring a tug. Every other time one of them had left the room a light tug had been all that was needed to open it; now, however, it didn’t budge. Henjo stepped back and eyed the huge oak door with suspicion. They wouldn’t, would they...?

He pulled again, then heaved, and finally picked up his crutch and hammered on the steel braced door that still refused to move.

“Bastards! Let me out!”

All of them came across and had a go, but nothing worked. The door remained impassive, solid, and very very shut. Nobody was getting out, and Dan stood back with a shrug. “Looks like they got you to stay safe with us anyway, Hen.”

“If I’d wanted to stay safe I would have stayed in Hamburg!”

“Looks like you didn’t talk fast enough to persuade Kai of that,” grinned Dan, snagging the rest of the plate of pizza and dragging Eero back round the corner to the bed. Henjo watched him go, unhappy. Kasperi picked his book up and patted the sofa.

“Come on. I’m sure they won’t be long.”

Henjo hobbled over and sank into the soft cushions, letting out a long, unhappy sigh. Looked like all he could do was wait, and fret, and--

By his elbow, a small table had appeared. On it was an elegant glass and pewter goblet, filled with mulled wine; he blinked at it, then picked it up and sniffed it carefully, his expression clearing when he realised that, somehow, the room had managed to provide him with exactly the sort of gluhwein he remembered from being a teenager. Happy memories swirled in his mind when he took a sip, and he relaxed and raised the glass.

“Thank you. At least somebody cares!”

He relaxed back into the sofa, cradling the goblet, and watched the flames in the fireplace dance their soothing pattern, over and over again.

~*~

Yoz was drawing a circle on the floor of the bedroom, and trying to ignore the bright eyes that watched every move she made. The eyes were bad enough, but the constant questions were worse; the fact that she ignored them didn’t seem to be making a blind bit of difference, either. Kai just sat there, cross legged, chin cupped in one hand, watching her far too closely for comfort.

“So what are you doing now? Are you going to stand in that circle?”

She ignored him, and continued to mutter under her breath as she made hasty preparations.

“I thought it had to be more complicated than that--”

He shut his mouth with a snap when she turned to him, expression suggesting painful and violent death if he didn’t shut up.

“I need you to be quiet. And stay there. And if anything looks like it’s going to get out of the circle I need you to run like fuck.”

“Anything? Like what?”

“Like anything.”

“But--”

She glared at him and he shrugged, smiling, then made a motion of his hand across his lips as though he were zipping them shut. She cocked an eyebrow and snorted, then stepped into the circle and lifted her arms, taking a few deep breaths and beginning to make the mental preparations for--

A small cough interrupted her, scattered her gathering thoughts.

“Don’t you have to chant or something?”

She lowered her arms and stared at him, genuinely astonished. Nobody had ever dared to interrupt her before, nobody. And after what she’d shown him earlier, and taking him into her room and everything Henjo had told him? She’d touched his mind and knew he’d understood her; he understood what the demon could do, and how powerful it was. She’d given him a bloody good look, rubbed his nose in it and he’d bounced back, accepting it and folding it into his psyche in such a way that even though he was still horrified by the whole situation he was now also, Powers help them all, fascinated by it.

And when something fascinated him, he had to get involved. He could no more sit back and watch than he could fly - and with determination like his she wasn’t even sure he couldn’t do that, if he thought about it long enough.

He would, she thought wryly, have made one hell of an acolyte.

Kai sat up a little straighter, not entirely sure he liked the way those mismatched eyes had slid from anger, through astonishment and then into calculation. He felt as though he were being measured, weighed and judged - and he didn’t like it at all, it turned out. He liked it even less when she smiled at him and held out her hand - a hand, he noticed for the first time, that was covered in tattoos from wrist to fingertips. He’d thought they were gloves.

“Come on, then. You want to see how it works? I’ll show you.”

He hesitated. She’d been full of how dangerous it was and now she’d just folded? It didn’t seem like the sort of thing he’d expect from her. And she was, after all, talking about demons...

She raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t tell me the nice Catholic boy is having second thoughts?”

Kai’s head shot up, and he frowned at her. The tone had been smug, and the expression suggested that she’d known all along he’d back out; you can handle the theory, said the little twist of her mouth, but the practical? Yeah. Right.

She cocked her fingers at him in a come-here gesture, and snorted at him when he still hesitated.

“Last chance. Sit here and shut up or come dance between the worlds with me...”

That settled it. He hopped off the bed and went to her, putting his hand in hers and stepping into the circle, careful not to scuff the hazy chalk mark any further with the soles of his bare feet. It tingled when he crossed it, but he didn’t bother to look down. He was too busy watching the slow creep of triumph in her eyes, and wondering if he was going to pay for this little adventure with his soul.

He stopped when they were almost nose to nose, and cocked his head with his best impish smile, the one that threw down the challenge to the world. Here I am, it said, catch me if you can.

She huffed amusement, and he was close enough to feel her breath on his face, a smell of cool places, secrets and hidden things. Her regard was calm; in his experience most people got rattled when you got this close to them, invaded their personal space and stared into their eyes. The very intimacy made them afraid, but he’d never suffered from it himself; now, however, whatever he could see in those odd coloured eyes was making him want to look away. Something moved in her gaze, something that could strip him down to the bare soul and leave him dying right here on the carpet, letting his blood soak in and go black and crusty before he was found. Just another dead rockstar, killed by curiosity as certainly as any cat ever was.

Chuckling uneasily, he turned his head and glanced at her sideways, through his lashes.

“You win,” he said, and she nodded.

“Always. Now. Will you do as I tell you?”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

Strong hands gripped his shoulders and turned him around, then shuffled him back until his back was pressed against her chest. Her jacket was almost large enough to enfold him as well, and he felt the sides of it tap on his flanks, heard the squeak of leather as she lifted her arms to shoulder height. Her body was warm behind him, and her breasts pressed into his back. He grinned and leaned back a little, rewarded with a chuckle.

“Irrepressible. Now I know what Henjo meant--”

“What?”

“Tell you later. Right,” and she lowered her hands, linking her fingers with his and returning both their arms to shoulder height, the backs of his hands pressed into her palms, her ink patterned fingers squeezing through his pale, freckled ones. Her chin rested on his bare shoulder, and the blue-streaked black of her hair tickled his ear and fell across his bare shoulder. “All you have to do is close your eyes and relax. Follow me, and just try to roll with it. Got that?”

He shrugged, rolling his shoulders against her body and grinning when he felt the unmistakeable sensation of nipples rising to rub against his skin through her shirt. She nipped his neck.

“Power is like sex. Keep your mind on Dirk, you bad lad, and we’ll see what we can do. Ready?”

“Let’s go.”

He was shivering with excitement, she could feel it; he’d never got around to putting a shirt on and his skin was almost crackling against her with the energy of his expectation. It had been a very, very long time since she’d taken a rider along like this, and never one with no experience at all. Still, if there was one thing she’d learned to do over the years it was wing it, and his energy would come in damn handy if the demon caught her on the hop. And if she had to dump his soul in Otherspace and do a runner, well, that would be regrettable - but it wouldn’t leave him any worse off than if the demon had gotten at him.

Comforted - in a way - by these thoughts, she closed her eyes and began to shift them both away from base reality, and out into the vast space between the Universes.

~*~

 _What the--_

:Don’t worry about it. We’re outside reality.:

 _What do you mean, OUTSIDE reality?_

Kai got the mental impression of a pained sigh, then the quiet voice invaded his mind again. Only it wasn’t even like a voice, not really - more like remembering what had been said, and never hearing a damn thing. Weird.

:Look, just pay attention, OK? It’s hard to explain, but if you just relax you should get a sense of it. And don’t panic or I’ll leave your ass here, right?:

Kai took a deep breath, ignoring the fact that he no longer appeared to have a body to take it with. Whatever, he could still feel Yoz - not her physical reality, but a sort of sense of her - in his mind, so as long as he had that, he reasoned, he’d be fine.

Pushing all those thoughts behind him, he turned his vision outward, getting his first good look around.

And he gasped.

A translucent ball of light rolled to their right, sparkling in the velvet blackness like the biggest spun glass ornament ever made, but billowing like silk; it roiled, clouds of wispy colour moving across its surface and drawing his attention down, through it to the myriad sparkling lights that flickered and fluttered within it. Taking his attention back he realised that there were more of them, all different colours, some dark, some light. Some had but a few sprinkles within them, others lines and vaporous swirls but only the closest one was filled from limit to limit by the coruscating, marvellous lights.

 _It’s beautiful. What is it?_

Yoz was impressed. He’d been taken Outside, a place that had driven more than one experienced Magus insane with its dark terrors, and all he could see was beauty. As above, she thought wryly, so below....

:It’s what our Universe looks like from the outside.:

 _What are all the lights?_

:Life.:

 _Life?_

:Yeah. Come on. We’ll go find our place.:

From their vantage point it was as though the delicate balloon of Reality reached out to them, pulling their minds in and smothering them for a moment in a confusing blare of colour and sound and smell; Kai lost his way for a moment, and only the quiet presence in the back of his mind kept him from panicking. He had no doubt she’d leave him here; there was something cold in the presence at his back that he didn’t want to test. Something implacable, and dark, dangerous and savage. He didn’t want to find out if it could detach itself from him as easily as he thought it could.

:Still with me?:

 _Yeah. This isn’t so bad,_ he thought, allowing a shred of his usual cockiness to seep back into his thoughts. He felt the snort, and would have grinned if he’d had anything to grin with. This was amazing.

Yoz gathered them both up and thought for a moment before narrowing their approach. This was delicate; Kai might not realise it, but he shone with a light so clear it was making them obvious to anything with eyes to see. Bringing him Out Here was going to attract a lot of attention, some of it just curious, some of it possibly deadly; but the amount of power she was able to siphon from him was such that for once, she felt that her usual caution could be abandoned, just for a little while.

:Ah, here we are. This is what the city looks like from Outside:, she said into his mind. :See the way everything’s connected? from the very stone of the planet to the concrete of the buildings, the plants and the trees and the bugs and the rats and the people. Good, innit?:

 _Is that the tourbus?_

Holy fuck. That was quick. It had taken her months - months of slow, painful training - to make sense of it Out Here, to connect patterns in Otherspace with their base reality equivalents, and he’d picked up the trick as naturally as breathing. She was half tempted to dump him Out Here just for being a smartass, but smothered the urge.

:Yeah, that’s the bus. Now have a good look around - we’re trying to find Dirk. Think you can do it?: she asked, being snide.

 _Sure!_ replied Kai, either missing the snideness or ignoring it. She went back to guarding them both, trying to hide Kai’s coruscating enthusiasm from any watchers and pushing them wherever Kai’s wildly active mind wanted to go.

His awareness touched the bus - from out here no more than a faint framework of lines, marked with the ghostly streaks of the personalities that rode it - then swept up to the hotel room, making the jump with an apparent ease that owed as much to her skill as it did his enthusiasm. It was like having a nuclear reactor stuck up her backside, and she had to admit that once you’d got used to it the sheer power of it was very pleasant indeed.

He picked up Dirk’s trail like a hound and with a shout of joy threw his awareness out, skimming across the gleaming wires of the city like a swallow in flight. He marvelled at the colours and bright sparkles of the different levels of awareness, murmured at the link between a sleeping mother and child, moaned for grief over the hospital they came across and the tangled, frayed webs of sorrow that gripped the place. He dived between Maternity and the morgue, lost in wonder at the stripes and bonds of obligation and love that linked the glowing beads of souls together; the explosion of light and sound when a new awareness broke through and bonded for the first time with its parent had him entranced with delight. She had to drag him out, however, when he became a little too curious at a rather darker scene playing out in a neighbouring ward. Here there was no bright light, but a low, dull thumping redness that coiled and turned in on itself, lashing out in bright sparks of fury at any other line extending toward it. He pushed closer, examining the pain that flowed out.

 _What’s this?_

:Suicide.:

Kai froze, then tried to dive in when the dull red began to fracture, sliced to pieces at its own hand.

 _No! We have to--_

:Shit, Kai, no! It’s too late, they’ve seen it--:

She pulled him back as a blackness began to ooze between the other lines, creeping up to the fading glow, putting out the embers and flowing over them to extinguish their light once and for all. Kai wriggled and cried in her grasp; she didn’t have to explain that sheer despair had called this blackness, and no amount of comforting words would be able to erase the memory of the soul that had been destroyed. It was no mere death, this; whatever the blackness was, it had erased even the memory that the world harboured of the life that had been. True darkness was the enemy of life and death, and only a soul that had lost everything could call it like that. Despair that deep had a power all of its own, and Kai was seeing it for the first time - although he’d passed close to it more than once in his life, and recognised its terrible intimacy.

He laid quiet, and she dragged him out.

:Idiot.:

He didn’t say anything, and she gave him a nudge. His aura trembled, and she swore at him in every language she knew until she felt it strengthen again. It had, after all, taken quite some time.

:Dammit man, you nearly bloody abandoned yourself out here!:

 _Sorry._

:So you fucking should be. Now. Dirk:.

Kai hesitated, then she felt him kick back into gear again and they were off. To a quieter part of the city where there were as many lights, but fewer bonds; people here kept to themselves, and it showed. Bad people, who’d done bad things. Even the cockroach’s auras were muted, as though they were aware of the atmosphere of dread that surrounded them. And in the middle of it--

 _There. Dirk!_

:Don’t--:

Too late. Kai - still smarting from the experience in the hospital - reached out to his friend with an eagerness to reconnect to his loved ones, somehow recognising the pattern, the sigil of light and motion that was a flesh-and-blood man in their reality. It was only her strength that stopped them from coming into contact. Back in reality, she knew, the man Dirk had been would have felt little more than a shiver. Somebody walking over his grave, perhaps.

The demon, however, knew exactly what was happening. And sensing enemies so close it reacted, faster and more violent than even Yoz was expecting.

Kai’s shriek when the pattern exploded into hideous growth almost loosened her grip on him. She dragged him back as fast as she could, trying to outrun the reaching tentacles of the demon, dodging claws that would tear their Other-selves apart and feed on Kai’s energy before coming for his body. It yowled, something so much more than noise that the whole cityscape trembled, people all over the city lifting their heads, afraid of something that brushed past their mind’s eye without identifying itself.

It came like a tornado, a hurricane chasing them, and she had to lock herself even more tightly to Kai and steal as much of his energy as she could and leave him breathing.

:Sorry mate, but this is an emergency--:

She hit the demon as hard as she could, the explosion blowing it clear back to its host and them back to their bodies, still standing in the hotel room where they’d left them.

Kai collapsed, retching, and even Yoz staggered. She grabbed him by the hair and yanked his head back, forcing him to look at her.

“Get dressed. We got to go.”

He sucked in a whooping breath, and tried to still the trembling. Why did he feel so weak?

“Why?”

“It knows where we are. It’s coming for us.”

~*~


	4. Chapter 4

_****_

Part Four

 

Kai, for once, didn’t argue. He didn’t wonder about her strength as she dragged him into his own room, didn’t speak as she flung shirt and trainers at him, didn’t wonder at the car keys she produced or tried to fight her as she towed him down the fire escape, swearing under her breath the whole time. His mind was moving through treacle, thoughts crawling along highways that would usually sparkle and flash with ideas, inspiration, _life._

He tried to wonder why, then gave up and just shook for a while. She seemed to be in control, so let her be. He’d catch up.

Eventually.

Yoz was not, as it appeared to the almost-comatose German slumped in the passenger seat of the little car she’d stolen, in control. Oh, she had the appearance of it, of course; she’d spent her whole life appearing to be in control, whether she was or not. It was the one thing that had got her out of more trouble than anything else - although it had also got her into plenty.

The demon was coming.

She could feel it, a pressure wave crossing the city. Boiling with rage in the skull of its host it was driving him as fast and hard as it could, its rage at Yoz’ interference knowing no bounds.

The demon was coming.

A black tsunami of hate was heading for them, as tall as a four storey building and as wide as the horizon. It wanted to smash them to pieces and crush the fragments to paste.

The demon was coming.

And she wasn’t sure she could stop it.

~*~

Henjo stirred on the couch, disturbed by a flailing shroud of darkness that shattered a dream. He’d been dreaming of Kai, flying in space and delighted by the stars; he’d been touching a nebula and laughing at the way it swirled and sparkled around his fingers. But then the dream had changed, becoming a nightmare of oozing black, and what had woken him had been the screaming. Angry, hate filled, a noise not even close to human. Nothing that inhabited the normal, sane waking world made a noise like that, no animal or person could contain the sort of rage that produced a sound like the one that filled his head, that froze the blood and shattered the bones, even in dreams.

He opened his eyes.

“You’re awake,” said a voice beside him, tight with nerves. Kasperi.

Pushing himself up on his elbows he let the youngster help him sit straight; with all the charging about and no painkillers for a while he was stiff and sore, biting back any complaints about being helped because, dammit, he needed all the help he could get. Gentle hands supported him until he could swing his legs down, and he groaned when still-injured muscles and tendons squeaked in anger at being moved. Looked like no matter how awesome the healing Yoz had done was, he still had an awfully long way to go before he was fit again.

“Looks like you’ll be filling in for me for a while yet,” he said, pulling his face into an approximation of a smile for the Finn. Kasperi huffed and flicked a long-fingered hand; that had nothing to do with what he was worried about.

“It’s dark,” sighed a voice. Dan. “And we couldn’t wake you.”

Henjo blinked. The lights had dimmed, only the fireplace throwing faint shards of gold light out to show them that they weren’t completely lost in this strange place. Even as he watched the fire slumped a little lower, the flames curling back in on themselves to scurry under the fire-worn logs where they could become mere embers, the gold flicker becoming a steady ruddy glow.

“What’s happening?”

The looming shadow that was Dan shrugged, spread its hands. “No idea. But it seems to like you - we thought you might be able to ask it.”

 _Ask_ it? From what he’d managed to gather the room was more like a smart dog or a horse than a person; it understood some things and it had likes and dislikes, but rational thought, reasoning, explanation?

Probably not.

But if Dan - and Eero and Kasperi, from the enthusiastic nods he could feel as much as see - thought it was worth it, he’d try. After all, it hadn’t tried to comfort any of them with anything specific, had it? But he needed to touch it, and rolling around on the floor seemed a little silly even for talking to what was, to all intents and purposes, supposed to be an inanimate object.

He relaxed back into the soft cushions, and let out a long breath through his nose. He needed to be calm, relax. Be ready to make an ass of himself with a cool head.

And when he cleared his mind, he felt it. The room was watching him, and it was afraid.

His eyes snapped open, pupils constricting from the sheer shock of the feeling. It was another being, another life - _inside_ his mind. Right, so it was making itself small and harmless so as not to frighten him, but it was there. In his head. With him. Something that wasn’t him.

Whoah.

“Hen...?” said Dan, voice beginning to waver as the last of the light began to fade. All they could see was a pile of coals, and when that went out it would be totally dark. Henjo took another breath, and shut his eyes. Maybe he didn’t need to be touching anything...? If it could reach his mind, then maybe the connection was two-way. And if it was then--

There. Fear. All scrunched up tight and miserable; his analogy of an animal hadn’t been far wrong. The - entity? Creature? He couldn’t think of it as a place, not any more - was shivering like a beaten puppy. They might not be able to see or feel what was happening outside the bubble, but it could. And whatever it could see (for want of a better word) was terrifying it.

He tried thinking comforting thoughts, but it just got darker and colder. Maybe he did need contact, then.

“Help me,” he gasped to Kasperi when his first attempt to rise was met with failure. He was just too damn stiff!

Between the three other men he got to his feet, stumbling across the stone flags in the last dying light of the fire, reaching blind for the wall he knew had to be there somewhere. Sure enough, the last ember flicked out just as his palms made contact with the smooth warmth of the wood panelling around the fireplace, and he walked his fingers up until they rested on the cooler skin of the stone that made up the flesh of this strange place.

And awareness flowed over him, the being that sheltered them surprised and delighted that he’d come to it like this, in friendship, in solidarity. It nuzzled his mind like a great cat, overcoming its fear to embrace him in the only way it knew how.

The other three turned to the fire, eyes widening as the flames burst forth once more. Light grew until they could see each other clearly; it was still dimmer and cooler than it had been, but a massive improvement on the cold black that had threatened them before. Henjo remained against the wall, forehead resting on the stone, sweating and mumbling under his breath; Kasperi moved a hand toward him, but the fire chose that moment to pop and spark, the sudden noise making him jump.

“Now what?” said Eero, turning his gaze up to Dan.

The drummer nibbled his lip, torn between picking his friend up and carrying him to the bed to rest and just leaving him to his weird communion with the wall. He shrugged, sliding his back down the edge of a bookcase and crossing his long legs, resting his chin on curled fists and his elbows on his knees.

“Now,” he replied with a sigh, never taking his eyes from Henjo, “we wait. What else can we do?”

~*~

Yoz gunned the little car through the sleeping streets of the city, swearing about cobbles and street signs and languages that didn’t sound like anything even remotely sensible. Dawn was still several hours away; she paused for a little curse about rock bands that just _had_ to tour in the winter when the goddamn nights were at their bloody longest and coldest and most fucking dangerous. What was wrong with roaming the planet in the summer?

Kai had fallen asleep, although passed out would be a more accurate description. Every time she made a particularly sharp turn Yoz would wince as his head smacked either the window beside him or crashed into her shoulder; he was going to wake up with some nasty lumps, anyway, although her shoulder wasn’t feeling too smart right now, either. She had no idea where they were going right now - the only thought in her mind was to get away. Away was the important thing for the moment, she’d consider the where later.

Although being caught in the open wasn’t a tremendously great idea either, she remembered as the towering, grubby apartment blocks began to thin into prettier, better kept suburbs.

In point of fact, the open was about the worst place to be caught when one had a demon hot foot after one’s backside. Caught out with nothing but open fields she would have one chance and one only - throw the band to the demon and hope it took long enough slaughtering them in its rage that she could escape.

She pulled a face even as she slewed the car around a corner, fishtailing it back toward the city centre. Even for her, that option was distasteful; yeah, she’d keep it in mind because one didn’t get to the top of the magic business without being able to throw the odd innocent to the wolves, but all five of them?

Make that plan Z, then. Trouble was, right now her thoughts were as skittish as her driving and she’d be damned - bad choice of phrase, admittedly - if she could come up with a plan B to plan Y. Plan A was easy.

Keep running.

~*~

Henjo’s nails were beginning to bleed.

Eero and Dan shared an anxious glance. The fire had grown steadily stronger, it was true, but their friend was suffering. It was in every line of his thin frame, his bared teeth, the long fingers that clutched and dragged at the stone. His breathing was harsh, and he shook; every time one of them made a move toward him, however, either something distracted them or a sharp - if brief - drop in temperature warned them off. Whatever was going on, it seemed they weren’t invited.

Kasperi bit at the sides of his fingers, and they waited some more.

~*~

The little red car screeched to a halt on one side of the cobbled square, steam rising from the overworked engine. The driver’s door popped open to disgorge a tousled Magus, still cursing under her breath. She scrambled round the car, boots slipping and skidding on the night-wet stones, yanking the passenger door open and dragging Kai out by main force. She leaned him against the vehicle, shaking him and cursing louder, slapping none too gently at his face and lifting her voice until she was bellowing at him.

A dog barked on the far side of the square, and a man’s voice shouted back, the tone needing no interpretation.

Yoz ignored it, shaking some kind of awareness back into the relaxed redhead under her hands.

“Kai! Kai, dammit, wake up. I left you more than this, I know I did. I need you awake, damn you - functioning would be nice but I’ll settle for awake. KAI!”

It was coming for them. She could feel it, could see it in her mind; it was on foot but for a monster as powerful as it was that was no hindrance. It bounded along the darkened alleys of the city, climbed walls, knocked over bins. The inhabitants of the place turned over in their sleep, touched by the rage as it passed them; they frowned and mumbled, burrowing deeper into the safety of their warm beds and their sleepy ignorance. The demon snarled, sweeping insubstantial fingers across so much prey so close, so out of reach. Somebody was going to pay for this... frustration.

“Kai! Fuck! Kai, wake up. I don’t say this very often but fucking hell mate, please wake up--”

A dog lunged at the shape crossing its yard, shaken from sleep by anger and the smell of anticipation, reaching the end of its chain and roaring, saliva spraying from huge yellow fangs before the fear curled around its tiny brain and made it cower. The shape that remembered being human crouched and grinned, a shining stream of drool escaping from the slack lips to string to the ground, steaming in the freezing night air.

The dog whimpered, a hundred pounds of muscle and bone and wiry black hair reduced to a shivering cur, and it tried to retreat. Too late.

The demon pounced, and inside his own head Dirk could only try to hide from the horror of what was happening.

“Kai!”

He trembled under her hands.

“Ohfuckwhatisitcan’tbeDIRK!”

Yoz grinned at him. “Yes. Good. Welcome back.”

Kai gripped her arms and stared at her, shaking. The vision that had flashed across his mind was so horrible that--

“Yoz?”

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”

“What’s happening?”

She laughed, a short bark of sound devoid of any actual amusement.

“I, mate,” she said with a tightness in her voice that would have surprised anyone that knew her, “have got a plan. Come on.”

~*~

It was beginning to really hurt, and Henjo still couldn’t figure out what it was trying to say. It was trying, he could tell, and it felt bad about hurting him but it was trying to show him... something... but he couldn’t grasp it. The blurred colours and stretched lines of whatever-it-was were giving him pains in parts of his brain he’d never known existed, and still he didn’t get it.

The pain receded, and a sensation of cool sadness that smelt like a mixture of the open ocean and deep pine forest washed over him. Ghostly fingers pushed sweaty hair from where it had fallen in his eyes, and stroked across his flushed cheeks. His muscles felt better, and bound as he was in this nowhere reality he knew the room was apologising to him in the only way it could.

He returned to himself enough to smooth his fingers across the carefully cut stone, not noticing the streaks of his own blood that he left as he did so. It’s OK, he thought, we tried. And I know Kai won’t give up on us. She won’t give up on you either, will she? If only I could see--

And with that, a flash of excitement broke the link. Henjo staggered back, blinking in the sudden light; to him the room had gone from drear and frightening dark to warm comfort in a single swift move. Kasperi was there to catch him as he fell, Dan but a breath behind him, and between them they laid him out on the sofa and threw a blanket - which was hanging from the back of the piece of furniture as though it had always been there - across his shivering form.

“What happened?” Dan asked, trying to look into his eyes and having to turn away. Whatever Henjo had seen, some of it was still reflecting from his gaze, and Dan didn’t think he wanted to go there. Henjo shook his head, blinked, tried to speak.

Kasperi patted his hand, hoping he wouldn’t notice the ruin he’d made of the ends of his fingers clawing the wall.

Henjo cleared his throat and pointed to the desk.

“There,” he managed to croak, then squeezed the hand of the youngster gripping his fingers in his warm, strong grasp. “Read it.”

And he relaxed down onto the sofa, asleep between one breath and the next, followed down by the affection of an entire Universe - albeit a small one.

~*~

Kai looked up, and gasped. She’d found one of those strange places so common in Eastern Europe, the sort of place that after wandering through cramped and dirty alleys for hours left the mind reeling with what the eye could not grasp in one glance. The people of these countries had always been poor, but devout; their churches were magnificent, each one striving to outdo the next in its praise of the Christian God in a solid prayer of stone and skill and beauty. The church reared above the square, lit from below, a shining beacon of hope to those lost in the night.

“A church?”

“It’ll slow it down. And...” she hesitated, then shrugged her ever-present backpack from her shoulder, weighing it in her hand for a moment before giving it a mighty swing and lobbing it over the railings. Kai tried to catch it with a cry, but missed.

“What are you doing?”

“The others. Hallowed ground; the demon’s going to be more interested in us. There’s power here in the city - somebody will pick the bag up. My place will see them safe, don’t worry.”

Kai hesitated, swallowed hard before turning to the tired looking Mage and studying her eyes for the truth. “And us?”

“We get one shot at this. If we screw it up...” she shrugged and turned away, rummaging in her pocket for a piece of chalk. Kai leaned on the car, filling his lungs with air so cold he could feel the moisture of his body crystallising on the inside. It brought him round, made him sharp, the tiny pain of cold against the horror of his mind and his memory.

“If we screw it up?”

Yoz glanced at him and snorted, a great white plume of breath shining in the reflected light from the church. “We’re dead. Now come and give me a hand.”

~*~

Lying on the desk, illuminated by an old-fashioned library light, sat a crystal ball and a thick, ancient leather bound book. Kasperi approached them, poking at the ball carefully; it sat solid on its stand, filling with a swirl of dirty smoke as he watched. He looked away, and it cleared. Back, and it was there again.

The fascinated noise he made drew Eero, and while the other youngster stared at the crystal ball in enchantment Kasperi picked up the book and began to page through it.

“Is this place!” he exclaimed to his friend, “is how it works! If I read this I can maybe get us out of here... if I can understand it...”

His voice tailed off as he concentrated on the archaic words and strange language, while an excited Eero made the discovery that by concentrating hard he could call forth an image of what was happening outside. He could see Kai and Yoz and they were in a square with a church--

Henjo snored on.

~*~

Working under her direction - and fast - Kai took a piece of chalk and made the marks she told him to across the cobble and asphalt surface of the square. They didn’t look terribly magical to him, and when he scuttled close to her on another pass - bent double drawing on the ground with a rapidly disintegrating piece of chalk - he said so.

“You’ll see,” she smirked with a wink, tossing him another piece and sending him out to describe another pale arc on the damp ground. He drew it, then looked over his shoulder with a shiver; something had moved in one of the deep alleys, something a lot bigger than one of the scruffy cats that watched every move you made down there.

“Yoz!”

She looked up and beckoned to him, the urgency of her expression lending wings to his heels. He was halfway there when a bellow behind him tore the air; he didn’t think his feet touched the ground as he closed the gap between himself and the Magus, sheer terror giving him an extra push. She wasn’t watching his desperate flight, instead looking over his shoulder with a tight, angry expression. He skidded to a halt and turned to face whatever had made the dreadful noise, breath whistling in his chest and face pale.

It was--

“No it’s not,” said Yoz quietly, pulling a packet of cigarettes from her pocket and lighting it, never taking her eyes from the figure that waited in the mouth of the alley, pausing for a moment until it had their attention before pacing out into the light of the square. “It isn’t Dirk. It looks like him and it might sound like him but it isn’t. Remember that. It’s important.”

Kai hissed through his teeth, then poked her in the small of her back. “Hey. You got a spare one of those?”

She passed him the pack with a snort, still watching the demon; Kai reached around her and tucked it back in her pocket when he was done, sliding his arm around her waist and giving her a quick hug before standing back half a pace to wait and see what would happen next.

“Come on,” she muttered between her teeth, the end of the cigarette bobbing to her words, “one more pace, fucker.”

Dirk moved with caution, glancing up at the soaring spires and shying from the glorious buttresses, lit up bravely against the biting cold of the night. He shifted from foot to foot, angling his head to look at all parts of the open space, the car, the surrounding quiet of the apartment blocks; Yoz just stood hipshot before him right in the middle of the open space, smoking, watching, sneering a little. Kai waited behind her, doing his best to appear as unworried as she and almost succeeding. Dirk moved again, sticking to the pavement near the buildings, hiding in the shadows.

“Coward,” said Yoz, and the single word rang through the freezing air like a gauntlet thrown to a steel sheet, reflecting from the buildings, cutting to the heart of the beast with its deliberate insult.

That did it. Dirk pushed his shoulders back and stepped forward, three long strides bringing him close enough that Kai could see the muscles working under the skin of what had been his friend.

“Gotcha,” she muttered, and snapped the fingers of her right hand in the demon’s direction.

Kai dropped and spun at the explosion of light and sound, one knee hitting the cobbles with a wince of pain he wouldn’t feel until much later. The line she’d had him draw around the square - it was a rough semi-circle, beginning and ending at the limit of the church fence - burst into a magnesium-bright, eye watering glare. The demon crouched and howled, the sound falling strangely flat to Kai’s somewhat numbed ears. Yoz grinned and flicked her cigarette end at Dirk, snorting when it bounced from his head and caught his attention with a snarl and a flash of pointed teeth. Kai got back to his feet, blinking; he’d seen Dirk laugh, snore, sing, shout and he knew his teeth weren’t long and pointed.

“It’s the demon,” said Yoz, lighting another cigarette. “It’s losing control. It’s angry. Aren’t you?”

Dirk didn’t answer, simply taking another pace toward the pair, snarling a threat. Kai swore.

The teeth were bad enough, but the rolling snarl that burst from the demon was worse. It lolled its tongue at them, a slimy black writhe of dripping muscle that drooled black ichor even as the demon flicked it, derisively; it unrolled to the middle of Dirk’s chest and wriggled at them, obscene in its non human twist of distortion.

“Oh fuck,” breathed Kai, staring at what had been his friend and sometime lover in utter dismay.

Yoz nodded, folding her arms and turning to keep facing the demon as it paced around them, sniffing the air like a hunting hound. Its eyes were dark, black from one edge to the other, shining wet highlights of the church lights reflecting back at them.

“Dirk,” moaned Kai.

The demon laughed and spread its arms, displaying the changed body to its audience; Dirk’s clothes had been torn in his run to corner them, and through the rents and rags his skin gleamed pale. Some things remained the same; the bass clef tattoo on his left arm, the hairlessness of his muscular chest, the twist of tendon across his strong wrists, the goatee beard. His hair, matted now with blood and dirt, fell around his face in a filthy cascade through which the black eyes shone with wickedness. He tilted his head one way and then the other, grinning at Kai, swinging the curtain of hair from side to side and showing the bloodied scrapes along the shaven sides.

“Kai,” growled the demon, and he swayed a pace forward, drawn to the horribly changed form in front of them.

Yoz put a hand on his chest and began to speak in a calm, normal tone; were it not for the fact she never took her eyes from the demon, never let it get behind them, she could have been in his hotel room with her feet on the table, discussing magic over a beer.

“The mark I just lit up has trapped us all. It’s an extension of Holy Ground; nobody can get in and we can’t get out.”

“Yet,” snarled the demon. Kai blinked, the compulsion to go to the demon broken.

She inclined her head to Dirk. “Yet,” she agreed, tone pleasant. “But for the moment you can’t reach anyone out there.”

“Neither can you.”

“I don’t want to kill anybody.”

Dirk leered at them both, stroking his hands - and Dirk’s nails had never been that long, Kai noticed while hysteria began to bubble up inside, or he’d never be able to play his bass - across his body. He was looking back at Kai once more, still swaying ever closer to them; his thighs flashed through tears in his jeans, and Kai found himself remembering the way those thighs gripped his waist, the way they felt under his hands, the times he’d sprawled across them and the times he’d licked his way along them--

“Leave him. Leave the man and I’ll let you go.”

Yoz’ voice was sharp, breaking the spell again.

“Never. I will burn this one from the inside and then take another. And another. I will take the redhead and then I will take the other - Henjo. Hennnnnnn....”

It laughed, throwing its head back and extending its body in a parody of a sensual stretch, twisting to display as much of the muscular structure through the ragged remnants of Dirk’s clothes. Kai’s mouth went dry.

“Maybe then I’ll take those two lovely boys. The one with the beautiful hands - wouldn’t you love to see his tongue loll and his eyes pop while you squeeze that lovely white throat in your fingers? Lap his blood when you tear the skin with your teeth? And Daniel... sweet Daniel. Green eyes. Legsssssssssssssss...” and it hissed the last word, chuckling obscenely at Kai’s horrified denial of everything it suggested.

“You will, little man. You will. Give in to me.”

“Yoz,” said Kai, and although his voice trembled it still sounded sure. “Kill it. I know Dirk. He’d die before he’d do that shit. Kill it.”

“She can’t,” spat the demon.

“What?”

“You wish,” she snorted, shrugging out of her jacket and dropping it on the pavement behind her.

“Can’t,” it mocked in a singing voice, “or won’t. Maybe won’t. Because if she kills me her master will be vexed....”

“Master?” said Kai, staring at Yoz’ profile in horror.

“There’s a fucking echo in here,” muttered Yoz, flexing her arms. “And he is not my Master. He owns a part of me, yeah. But that’s all. I no more serve him than you serve the Angels, pal, and that’s the fucking truth.”

Kai just stared at her, blinking rapidly, trying to wrap his mind around the implications of what the demon was saying.

“It’s a demon, Kai. It twists words. And this one is particularly good at it, aren’t you? I know you, Glasya-Lebolas. I know your name. I know your rank and your obligations, I know who looks to you and your affiliations and your powers and _I am sending you back to Hell._ Now be a good chap and fuck off now before this gets any nastier than it has to, right?”

The demon had jumped back when she had said its name, throwing a quick glance over its shoulder as though watching for unseen enemies; when it looked back Kai swore that for a moment he saw Dirk - the real Dirk, his friend - looking out of his own eyes. Just for a second, a flash - but in that moment he knew that he was still in there, trapped in his own body while it was mauled and abused by the demon. And from the look in his eyes before the demon regained control, he was steadily going mad in there.

Dirk advanced on her, and Kai backed up; no matter how pitiful the expression had been he suddenly didn’t want to be within fifteen feet of the... the thing... that Dirk had become. He moved, trainers rasping over the damp cobbles, not looking at where he was going, just keeping the same distance between himself and the demon. He could feel it now, dry heat radiating from its body, Dirk’s smell that he was so familiar with from nights spent twined together bastardised by the stench of the demon, reaching into his mind and trying to draw him closer.

He crossed another of the lines he’d drawn earlier, a shaky ellipse in the oddly greenish-coloured chalk Yoz had thrown to him so negligently. He’d asked her what was in it, and from her expression had believed her when she said he didn’t want to know. One more pace took him outside the space he’d so carefully delineated earlier, in another lifetime. The life he’d had before one of his best friends leered at him with a demon’s face and suggested hideous acts that he could see in his mind’s eye so clearly--

And in the same moment, the demon crossed into the same area.

The flash threw him from his feet, and the demon released an enraged howl that had him covering his ears and swearing. By the time he looked up the two were glaring at each other, nose-to-nose within a shining soap bubble of space, a bubble with delicate walls that nevertheless crackled with energy. Voices drifted through it, distorted by power and faint, but there.

“What have you done?!” howled the demon, swiping at the wall with ragged nails and yowling when the finespun walls spat gold fire at the touch.

“Locked us in. Now, cuntcheese, what say we find out which one of us is the most butch?”

And they dived on each other, teeth and nails and flying hair and cursing and--

Yoz wasn’t immune to her spell either. Every time she brushed the walls they spewed gold sparks and she yipped with the pain, not letting it distract her from her effort to tear the demon into little tiny pieces. The trouble was that the demon had stolen a strong body, a body kept toned by months on the road and looked after by its original owner. And no matter how hard she tried, Kai could see that she was going to lose.

He had to do something, and looked around wildly. Nothing leaped out at him, and when he swung back round to stare helplessly at the vicious - if confined - battle in front of him he yelped in surprise. Dirk had Yoz pinned to the ground, snapping his razor teeth above her throat and drooling black. She had her legs wrapped around his waist, forcing him back, and he was grinding his crotch against her. And laughing.

That laugh would haunt his dreams. It was not Dirk’s laugh.

He looked into her eyes, hoping to say something - if it was only goodbye - and caught her flick of a glance toward her jacket, discarded on the ground behind the bubble. He ran for it, avoiding the globule, and picked it up. It twitched in his grasp and he dropped it, fingers trembling with a mixture of cold, exhaustion and fear; Yoz groaned and the demon screeched, swiping at him through the bubble’s walls and curling up momentarily, charred by the tremendous, electric flash that burned it.

There had to be something in the jacket. It had to be--

Her room. She’d thrown the bag, but she hadn’t reached into her bag, had she? And she always went for her pockets whenever she wanted to get out the glassy sphere that contained the separate Universe that her room lived in. And the others were in the room, so...

... so he didn’t have a single clue what he should do next, and inside the bubble Yoz and Dirk were killing each other.

~*~

Kasperi yelled for Dan. The glass sphere he was watching the action unfold in had begun to get hot - and not just metaphorically, either. Whatever he’d used to call the scenes up before them must be responding to the fight behind Kai, because the crystal was humming and beginning to shine with a faint phosphorescence. And heat up. He could see Kai, rummaging through Yoz’ discarded jacket, sometimes yelping and jumping, other times just cursing when something moved under his questing fingers or one of the combatants brushed the forcefield surrounding them.

“What? What?”

“Shit. Dirk is--”

The Finn waved his hand at the picture, losing his English with the shock of it all. Henjo slept on, oblivious to the drama, but the room was aware of it, on some level; the fire was burning higher and they could all sense the agitation. From what they - mainly the two youngsters - had observed, they might well end up trapped in here; if Yoz was killed the demon would presumably take Kai, and none of them thought that the room would open for a demon. It would probably let them all rot in here before it would do that. The solution to all their problems relied on Kai figuring out how to get them out.

Eero swore and turned to Dan. “If Kai can find somewhere to put the - ball, I can’t think of the word! - Kasperi says he can open the door. We can get out. We can help. But Kai must figure out somewhere.”

Dan bit his lip. “Go wake Henjo.”

The kid fled, leaving the two other men staring anxiously into the crystal. Kasperi let out a long string of expletives when they saw Kai finally retrieve the marble, then stare around himself as if drawing a blank as to what to do next. The glow behind him was growing stronger, pulsing with the furious energies released inside it; the battle must be reaching a climax in there.

“The church, Kai,” muttered Dan under his breath, beginning to sweat, “the _church_. Come on man, figure it out...”

Helpless, they watched. And hoped.

~*~

Yoz fought on, using every dirty trick she’d ever learned to keep the demon off her. She was fighting two battles here, and suspected that she couldn’t win either one without some help; the physical fight to keep Dirk from killing her, and the struggle between her energy and the demon’s. If it won that one she was well and truly screwed - and sliced and diced and munched and ripped to tiny bloodied pieces, in all probability. Her inked sigils and spells were helping, but if she didn’t get an extra hit of energy soon--

She slammed her head forward, grinning at the way Dirk’s nose crunched under the impact, and kept going. Fight or die, no other choice.

She just hoped she’d given Kai enough clues to figure out how to help her. And ultimately save them all.

~*~

Kai cast about, the smooth little sphere clutched tight in his hand. Despite his sweaty palm it stayed cool, vibrating somehow, more alive than anything that looked like a glass marble had any right to. Behind him Yoz was losing. Dirk was being consumed by the demon from the inside out. His friends were trapped out of reach - and yet as close as a heartbeat. He had to believe that the jacket hadn’t been dumped just so that she could show off her tattoos--

Think, Kai. Think.

Where are you? By a church. Well, yeah. Outside in the cold. Yeah, that too.

Outside.

It couldn’t open outside. It had to open in something.

His eyes tracked back to the church, and he found himself offering up a little prayer to a God he didn’t think he believed in any more for help, an idea, something.

He went back to looking around, throttling an urge to just run away screaming. The delicate-looking bubble of force that held the viciousness of the battle confined was beginning to break down, he could see; it emitted little puffs of energy every time one of the combatants touched the wall, and small holes kept appearing here and there. The demon wearing the face of his friend leered, dropping him a wink when it caught his eye, a promise for when it escaped.

He looked back at the church and--

The church.

She’d said that the first barrier _included the church._

A building.

An enclosed space.

And churches were never locked, were they?

Throwing a swift look back at the bubble, Kai yipped. Yoz was down, Dirk crouched over her back, licking at the back of her neck and laughing. She was twitching, trying to throw it off, but collapsed in a panting heap while he watched. Dirk began to run his fingers down her spine and she jerked, swearing; with an effort, Kai turned away. Nothing he could do by staying here, so he’d better just hope he’d figured it out in time and--

He swore at himself, and took off toward the church doors. Shut up Hansen, and run!

~*~

Dan yelled, bringing a very grumpy Henjo awake. Eero looked up, wide-eyed; he’d been trying to wake the man for five minutes and got nowhere fast. Dan’s shout, however, would very likely have woken the dead, it was so loud.

“What?” muttered Henjo, brushing unruly hair from his eyes and wincing with pain. Dan grabbed Kasperi by the shoulder and shook him.

“You can open this place?”

The youngster took a deep breath, and nodded. Dan bared his teeth and ran past Henjo, skidding to a halt by the fireplace and grabbing the poker. He turned, still grinning like a wolf, and waved the razor sharp end under Henjo’s nose. He eyed it, blinking at the soot-darkened steel being brandished in his face, and felt confused.

“Wake up Hen,” laughed the drummer, crazy lights flickering in his usually gentle green eyes, “we’re getting out of here!”

~*~

Kai charged through the outer door of the porch and flung himself at the inner door. The church would be huge but it--

He found himself on the floor, his whole face tingling from the collision with a very solid object and his mind rattling in circles. He’d run into the door. But he’d turned the handle and...

The truth dribbled into his mind. The door was locked.

~*~

Kai was glad Yoz couldn’t hear him, hammering his fists on the oak and screaming like a crazy man.

“Fuck, fuck fuck fuck FUCK! What sort of bastards lock a fucking church?!”

There had to be something, he thought, still beating himself against the door until the skin on forehead and fists broke open, marking the ancient steel bound wood. He leaned his sore and aching head on the immovable barrier and sobbed for breath, feeling as defeated as he ever had. Locked. It couldn’t be locked because that meant he couldn’t get into an enclosed space... and... put...

He blinked, freezing so still that even his breath congealed in his lungs. Maybe, if the size of the space didn’t matter....

He dropped the marble, leapt out of the porch, slammed the outer door behind him and ran like hell back to where Yoz was still fighting for her life. There had to be something else he could do. Even if it involved bleeding.

~*~

She’d failed. The fucking demon was going to get the upper hand, do something horrid to her - demons were not known for their gentleness with their enemies - then rip Dirk to shreds and start on Kai. And with the sort of natural shine Kai had to him the world could be in a lot of fucking trouble.

One last effort, then.

Twisting herself round she sank her teeth into the demons arm, surprising it just enough to lift a knee into its groin and distract it still further. Dirk howled, fighting the intruder from the inside and she managed to shove her way free, spotting Kai pelting back across the square and then - oh, happy day - the twitch in the ether that signalled the unfolding of a very familiar little bubble of space.

Drawing back her boot she kicked the demon in the face, splitting the already ruined nose a little more.

“Stitch that, you mangy bastard,” she had time to snap, before the demon sprang up and leaped on her one last time.

~*~

Kai heard Yoz say something indistinct to the demon after she’d kicked it, and just had enough breath left to yip when it jumped on her and knocked her back into the barrier, holding her there while it sizzled and popped, lightning bolts of terrible energy pouring through her and escaping through her eyes, bursting from her skin, sizzling her hair and crisping her fingernails. The thing that looked like Dirk laughed, pushing her harder, whooping for joy despite the injuries it was itself sustaining.

Opening his mouth to scream he stopped, wondering how he could be hearing the sound but still gasping for breath. The answer charged past him just as the barrier exploded, flinging Yoz and the demon apart; Dan, howling at the top of his lungs and holding a poker.

A _poker?_

What the fuck was a poker going to do?

Yoz raised her hand and without any hesitation Dan threw it, skidding to a halt on the slippery cobbles behind the demon, distracting it. Dirk’s face turned to him and laughed, black slimy tongue ulcerated and dripping more than just the black ichor now; yellowish fluid and good old ordinary blood drooled down Dirk’s chin and his friend and drummer screamed at him again. Dirk flung his arms wide, and roared his victory.

Which was when Yoz, with unerring aim for one almost blinded by burns, shoved the poker straight through his chest.

“Glasya-Lebolas, Earl of Hell and commander of the Thirty-Six Legions, I send thee back to thy place of refuge. This is my command.”

The demon squealed, and for the first time they all heard the very human scream underneath it. It was working.

“Got you, fucker. Now piss off,” she snapped, and twisted the poker.

A cloud of filthy steam exploded from Dirk’s body, hovered for a moment over them all, then vanished. Dirk was free.

He was also, Kai realised when he knelt by the bleeding man on the pavement, dying.


	5. Chapter 5

_****_

Part Five

 

“Hey,” said a voice from behind him, and Kai turned his gaze from Dirk’s bloody chest to see Yoz, flat on her back and shivering. Her face and arms were scorched, ravaged by the blinding heat of the energy bursts when her force bubble had disintegrated. Kai hovered, wanting to go to her but feeling that he should be with Dirk as he--

He swallowed hard, and turned away from the shivering woman. With his friend as he died. He just didn’t want to believe it.

Dirk coughed, a fine spray of bright blood bursting from his lips. Kai leaned forward and took his hand, gripping it tight; Dirk clutched it back, rolling eyes now back to their normal grey at him. There was pain there, fear, but nothing like the terror that they had held earlier. The demon was gone. He tried to speak, but Kai stopped him; from over his shoulder he could hear Henjo talking to Yoz, quiet but forceful, and he smiled. Henjo was using his Things-Shall-Be-Thus voice. He was probably telling her off.

“It’s gone,” Dirk croaked, and Dan lifted his friend gently, cradling him in his arms and settling him across his lap. Dirk groaned, the poker trembling with every beat of his heart; despite the pain he smiled up at the drummer, and the expression was sweet.

“Yeah. And you’re gonna be fine--” Kai began, nose beginning to run and blinded by his own tears.

“No,” wheezed another voice, and Yoz dropped to her knees beside Dan. Dirk tried to grin up at her, but was seized by another coughing fit. When he finished Kai was crying hard, Henjo’s arm wrapped around his shoulders, and tears dripped from the end of Dan’s nose. Eero knelt by his back, rubbing it in small circles; Kasperi hovered around the outside of the little gathering, uncertainty written all over his face. He wanted to be with them, but wasn’t part of them. In fact, he was only there because of the demon, and right now that fact cut him like a knife.

Stretching out the hand not holding onto Dirk Kai drew the kid in, pulling him down to kneel by his side. He looped an arm around his shoulders, leaned his head on his shoulder; the kid was crying now, short sniffs and a slow leak of wet heat onto Kai’s shoulder. He didn’t want him left out. He wanted him here, to witness his friend--

“Kai. Kai, listen to me. I can do this, I can stop him dying but I need you to listen to me.”

Go to Hell, Kai said in his mind. You killed my friend.

“Listen to her,” added Henjo, and when Kai turned to look his other friend was watching him, gaze as filled with compassion as anything Kai had ever seen.

Yoz touched his shoulder, and he realised she couldn’t see him through her seared eyes. Hurting, blind, she wanted to help. She still wanted to help.

He took a deep breath. “OK,” he said, and a ghost of a smile swept across her face.

She nodded, slowly, and he turned back to Dirk to avoid looking at her. Ripples of burnt tissue covered her face, her lips peeling and darkened, eyes swelling shut and tearing from the terrible damage; her hands had been reduced to paws, the burns almost obliterating the colourful patterns and swirls of her skin. Surely she was too hurt to do anything?

The snort let him know Yoz was still herself, despite the injuries.

“You’d be surprised, mate, although it does indeed sting like a motherfucker. Now, it’s going to work like this...”

Through him, apparently. Although this church carried much power - he’d been about to ask why, but Dirk’s jerk on his hand had warned to him to ask later - she couldn’t access it. Not alone. She was not a Christian.

And demons knew her, and what had she meant by ‘owned a piece of her’? He’d ask later.

He, however, was of the correct religion. They all were, even if they weren’t particularly devout. Which meant she could use him, use them all, to steal enough power to save Dirk’s life. All they had to do was--

“Witchcraft,” muttered Eero, shrinking back from Yoz. She hissed with frustration.

“Not as you mean it. We need you, kid. Dirk needs you - all of you.”

He considered this, Dirk watching the scene playing out above him with the light fading from his eyes, each rise of his chest more laboured, the blood flowing from his body pooling around their knees and going cold, sticky against the skin of his friends. The sky was beginning to grey, and it would soon be dawn.

“My soul will not be damned for this?”

Yoz bared her teeth, blood running from her cracked and split lips. “Define damned,” she said, and Eero blinked.

“This is no time,” sighed Henjo, “for a discussion on the finer points of comparative religion.”

Eero considered for a moment, but when Dirk began to cough again - moaning with the pain - he caved in, leaning hard against Dan and shaking like a leaf in a high wind.

“I will do it.”

“Thank fuck,” said Yoz, and Kai chuckled when he realised Dirk’s lips had formed the exact same same words.

~*~

They formed a circle around their dying friend, trying not to look at the poker sticking out of his chest or see the bluish tinge to his lips. His eyes were getting frightened again, and he could no longer speak; he could feel the darkness coming for him, a creep of nothingness plucking at his skin. He was terrified.

Kai, knelt by Dirk’s head, placed one hand on the shaft of the steel, the other over the dying man’s heart. Dan and Henjo each had their hands on his shoulders, one shoulder each, and Kasperi and Eero knelt on either side of the body with their fingers linked across his stomach. Yoz crawled behind Kai and carefully, slowly, pulled herself to her feet; Kai felt the wetness of breaking blisters from her burns soaking into his shirt and shivered, the cold now striking at him in earnest.

He didn’t know if the exclusion spell was still working but the square was unnaturally quiet; well, he thought it was unnatural, but then he had no idea what day it was. Maybe nobody got up around dawn today. Whenever today was....

Yoz placed both hands on Kai’s shoulders, gave them a reassuring squeeze that must have been as painful as all hell, and began to speak. Straining to hear her, he realised with a shock she was speaking Latin; he could remember bits and pieces of it, but only fragments. It was a prayer, but like none he’d ever heard before; this prayer demanded, not asked, and talked to the entity he’d been raised to think of as God like a naughty child. It demanded and argued, and from the fading glow of the lights illuminating the church a cautious finger of mist drew itself together, and touched the top of the poker.

Dirk gasped, and his eyes went wide with shock. The poker stopped trembling, and when he let out his breath with a long sigh Kai feared he was dead. But the glow got stronger, and so did Yoz’ voice. The chant was somehow melodic, filled with emotion, and he wondered for a brief, loopy moment what it would sound like if she sang; the way she controlled her voice he suspected she’d be pretty good at it.

It took him a few seconds to realise it, but she was somehow channelling the power through him. He felt lifted, warmed. If it was possible to know the strength of being an Angel, then he knew it in that moment. Her voice shaded toward normal, and he knew without looking that she was stealing some of the power to heal her own injuries. He also knew - maybe from his link, maybe from the sheer amount of power now lighting up the steel bar in his hands like a lightning rod - that the process was not painless, not for her. Contact with this Christian power was burning her as surely as the flares of energy had done earlier, but still she pressed on.

Dirk’s face had relaxed, and he wasn’t breathing.

“Take out the steel,” she told him, giving his shoulders another reassuring squeeze. “Hang on in there, guys. Almost done.”

He tightened his fingers, held his own breath, and lifted.

The poker came free with a tearing sound, and a weak cry of pain from Dirk. He tried to twist, but they held him firm; the white glow circled them, touching each of them before the steel in Kai’s hand lit up, burning white like a flourescent tube, sending tendrils of that ghostly power into each of them before turning and diving into the hole in Dirk’s chest, filling it with a rolling boil of white-lit mist. Yoz’ voice forged on, now demanding sharply, ordering the energy to patch and heal, to restore what the steel and the demon had taken.

Dirk jerked, and gasped; Kai felt the heart under his hand leap and breathed in the power, feeling his own soul take flight--

And it was over. Dirk, battered and bruised but no longer bleeding, curled up on his side and retched. The others gathered around him, patting him and laughing, weeping and babbling but only Kai saw Yoz stumble away, gathering up her jacket and bag. He rose, and went to join her where she hovered on the edge of their gathering, watching with eyes as calm as the night sky.

“What now?” he said. She shrugged.

“Somebody’s seen the lights; police and ambulance are on their way. Tell ‘em you got attacked.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Heal. Tour. Perform. Make music. Do what you do best.”

Kai nodded, looking back at his friends. Dirk had stopped retching and was curled in Henjo’s lap, shivering.

“And you?” he asked, turning back to Yoz. She shrugged.

“I’ll be around. When you least expect it, probably.” She cocked her head, listening to the bells atop the spires begin to ring, pealing out to call the faithful to worship. “And that’s my cue to leave - for the moment, anyway. Be well, Kai.”

She leaned in and kissed him on the lips. When he opened his eyes, she was gone.

The first flashing lights were entering the square when he rejoined his friends.

~*~

It took weeks to heal the physical hurts sufficiently to get back on the road. Kai said - in a press release explaining that they’d been out drinking and got attacked by a gang trying to rob them - that he could take on a temporary guitarist, but not a bassist as well; Kasperi and Eero went home, the keyboardist under obligation to return when the tour restarted. Dan spent a lot of time moping, missing the young Finn who’d brightened his days and enlivened his nights.

Henjo and Dirk went home, and spent most of their time together. Talk was awkward, at first, but Dirk didn’t want to be alone and from what he knew of Yoz he figured Henjo would be the best person to understand. Henjo told him about the horrors of the underground Voodoo church, and Dirk told him that the demon had left him with some memories he really didn’t want.

Henjo looked into his friend’s eyes, and realised that he was slowly going mad.

He called Kai, and asked what the hell he ought to do. Kai hadn’t been avoiding the pair of them, precisely; some of the things he’d seen while Yoz had taken him for a whirl outside of space and time had caught his attention to the point where he wanted to know more, and he was deep in research. Dirk had also asked him for some time to think things over, and there was even a strange look in Henjo’s eyes these days; Kai just stayed away, waiting for one or both of them to open up to him.

“Dirk’s getting worse,” said Henjo baldly when Kai finally answered the phone. He’d got into the bad habit of letting the answer machine pick up his calls, seeing who it was before he spoke to them. Henjo had simply developed the equally annoying habit of ringing anything up to ten times until Kai actually picked the phone up himself just to keep it quiet.

Kai hissed through his teeth, juggling phone and lighter while he tried to ignite the cigarette clamped between his teeth.

“Damn shit! I don’t know what I can do about it--”

“Can you get hold of Yoz? She might know.”

Kai dropped the lighter and swore. “She doesn’t exactly have a manager I can call, does she. Damn, dropped my - oh th--”

A flame popped into existence in front of the cigarette, and Kai sucked it into life before he actually thought about what he was doing.

He had been alone in the apartment.

And the flame he’d just lit his cig with was coming from his lighter, a stupid cheap plastic one.

Which he’d just dropped and not picked up.

Gripping the phone so tight the handset creaked with the clutch of fingers on plastic, he ran his eyes down the stubbily cheerful pink case to the hand holding it. Short strong fingers, not dissimilar to his own, laced and woven with sweeping coils of inked alchemical designs leading down to a wrist which poked out of a tatty, worn, and thoroughly disreputable looking fringed leather jacket. Up the arm and across the shoulder and up the neck and--

Yoz plucked the handset from Kai’s numb fingers and winked at him.

“Henjo?”

“Yoz!”

“Yup. Is Dirk with you now?”

“No. He’ll be back in the morning.”

“So will I. See you then, mate.”

She hung up, and opened her arms to Kai with a grin.

“Don’t I get even a hug hello?”

~*~

Once she’d picked herself up from the floor - where she’d knocked by Kai’s exuberant welcome - relit his cigarette and sparked one up for herself, dusted him down, dumped her bag and put a fresh pot of coffee on, she was ready to answer some of Kai’s questions. Which he’d been babbling at her since she’d shot him that first grin, not even stopping when the breath had whooshed out of him when they’d rolled over on the floor.

“Kai! Breathe!” she laughed, turning to cock her head at him, mismatched eyes glittering in the harsh flourescent of the kitchen.

He stopped talking and grinned at her.

“Thank fuck you’re back,” he said, and then his face fell. “It’s Dirk,” he added, turning away to look out the kitchen window, staring at the flickering lights of the city as though they might hold some of the answers they sought.

“I know. It’s part of why I came back.”

“Part?”

“Yeah. The other part is you.”

“Me? Why me?”

She snorted and turned to fiddle with the coffee machine for a minute. Kai watched her, almost holding his breath; she was frowning, and he didn’t think it was anything to do with his kitchen equipment. While he waited for her to gather her thoughts sufficiently to explain whatever was troubling her he just watched her; she’d dumped jacket and bag by the phone, and was wearing her usual attire of scruffy cargo pants, big boots and minimalist vest shirt on top; he stared at her tattoos, the ink appearing to change shape and colour under the light. One snake appeared and vanished beneath the fall of her black hair, and he would have sworn it moved its head when a lock of hair dropped across it, keeping him within the field of its beady gaze.

He wondered how much of her skin was covered with the sprawling sigils and curling patterns, and she turned back to him with a snort and a raised eyebrow.

“Wouldn’t you like to know, pal. And yeah - you. You’ve been digging around, haven’t you?”

Kai tried to look innocent. “Me?”

“Yeah, you. Research. Talking to people. Trying to get access to some private book collections of a very specific type.”

“Um. Might have.”

She eyed him sceptically, and he had the good grace to look rather sheepish. “Yoz, what you showed me--”

“Is dangerous. Did Henjo give you the full story of how we got to you in Plzen?” She clucked her tongue. “I hate those names with no sodding vowels. Anyway, did he?”

“Well. Yeah.”

“Matata has been asking questions about you.”

Kai paled. “The Voodoo guy?”

“Yeah, the Voodoo guy. And Sharufa has been poking around on some of the parallel planes trying to see if she can use you to get free - you’ve been drawing a hell of a lot of the wrong sort of attention. If I can’t turn it away from you pretty fucking quick I’m going to have to either train you or,” and here she took a deep breath, fixing him with a very direct look indeed, “kill you.”

 _“What?!”_

She stepped into him and grabbed both his shoulders, tightening her fingers and staring straight into his eyes. “Kai, there’s a glow to you that even I have never seen in anyone before. You’re so alive I’m amazed you’ve never come to anyone’s attention before - you’re like a nuclear reactor to someone with the Sight. And suddenly you’re being noticed. There’s a lot of people out there who want that kind of power, and stealing it is a damn sight quicker than taking the time to draw it in, build it up. And with you it’s always there, no having to replenish stores after a tough day.”

Kai wondered how rough things would have to get before she described something as a tough day, then decided he didn’t want to know.

“Do you want to spend the rest of your life as somebody’s prisoner, a living battery?”

“No, course I don’t. But why do you care? If there’s one thing I have learned it’s that the great and powerful Yoz doesn’t give a flying fuck about anyone but herself, so why the concern?”

He was getting angry now, wriggling his shoulders in her grasp and scowling, trying to twist away. She shook him once, a sharp jerk to force him to focus.

“You’re not entirely wrong. But look at it from my perspective. Some two bit nothing shows up on my patch with enough power to send me straight to Hell and for why? Because it’s power stolen from you. Maybe I don’t have your welfare at heart, but I sure as _shit_ want to keep myself breathing - because you know where I’m going when it’s all fucking over for me, don’t you?” and she was getting angry now too, spitting the words at him furiously. “I sold my soul for power a long time ago, when I thought I’d lost the only person who would ever give my life meaning. I was young and stupid, Kai, and one day I’m going to have to pay the price for that. But not today. And not because I left a fucking innocent wandering around with enough power at his fingertips to set every Magus on the planet at each others throats in a war to control him!”

He shook himself free of her and pushed her back, advancing on her when she refused to retreat, shouting in her face.

“So you’d kill me for that? You would murder me rather than do something about it?”

“Henjo told you the story - imagine Matata with the power to flatten the city! And don’t think he wouldn’t, either - that Loa of his has enough fury stored up that even I don’t know how far she would go for revenge. And remember Dirk, your friend, what he was able to do to people?”

That was something else that Kai had been getting a bit thoughtful about recently. During his researches he’d branched off briefly and managed to get hold of a partial copy of the coroner’s reports on the people the demon had murdered while it inhabited Dirk. It had not made comfortable reading, and he would be seeing some of the pictures in his nightmares until the day he died.

“Yeah, exactly. If he’d taken you he would have been able to raise an army, maybe even kick off Armageddon for all I know.”

Kai stared at her, speechless.

“Now you get it, don’t you? You, Kai, could be the catalyst that sets off the final war between Heaven and Hell - in the wrong hands. And that’s something that I, not to mention lots of other-” she snorted and waved a hand vaguely, “-concerned bystanders really don’t want. Whole species have dedicated themselves to not allowing this plane to fall to the tyranny of the Angels, and we’ll be damned if we let you screw it up.”

“Oh.”

She sighed, and turned away to busy herself with pouring two mugs of coffee. When she pushed his at him her face was miserable. “And I don’t want to hurt you.”

“So,” he said, keeping his voice low and his tone reasonable, “teach me. You say I’ve got the raw ability, the power, teach me to use it.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” and she paused, refusing to look at him while she tried to come up with a reason that he would believe, “you can’t. Not and escape Hell. You’re a Christian, yeah?” she shook her head. “Of course you are, or that little stunt in the square wouldn’t have worked. I don’t have time to explain it all now, but the Universe is a... complicated place.”

He laughed. “That’s what I like about the English. They have a talent for understatement.”

She stuck her tongue out at him and laughed. “The point is, you fuck about with this stuff too much and it’ll damn you to Hell, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred pounds. Bad.”

He nodded, and stared at her over the rim of his mug while he took a hearty slug of his coffee, and she watched him right back; they were beginning negotiations to achieve a deal that he didn’t fully understand, but knowing that he might well die if he screwed it up gave him all the incentive in the world to deal hard. Yoz hissed through her teeth and smiled, the skin at the corners of her eyes crinkling with amusement.

“Clever little bastard, aren’t you?”

Kai bowed from the waist and dropped her a wink. “There must be something you can do to buy us more time.”

“Maybe.”

“Oh, come on. From what I’ve heard you can do anything.”

“Hah. Flattery will get you nowhere, Hansen.”

“Really? That’s not what I heard,” he grinned, moving toward her and sliding an arm around her waist, backing her up against the kitchen cabinets. His grin was mischievous now, sensing that he’d cracked the Yoz facade. There were many things he’d heard about the infamous Yolanda Bowsher during his researches - although most of them were whispers, sneers, half lies and insults - and some of them he thought he could use. For instance...

“In fact,” he continued, pressing his body against hers and slipping a thigh between her legs, moving his face close enough to feel her breath, “I heard that you have a weakness for men who follow a certain profession.”

She snorted and tilted her head, narrowing her eyes even as she placed both hands on his hips. “You did, did you? And what profession would that be?”

“Music,” he replied, leaning in to let his lips touch hers, “you have a real soft spot for musicians.”

He kissed her, cautiously at first; after all, a woman as powerful and unpredictable as Yoz needed to be handled with care, or he could well find himself on the floor with a mouthful of broken teeth. She let him set the pace, smiling against his mouth at the first touch of his tongue, sliding her hands up his back to stroke at the long lines of muscle she found there. He stroked her side, caressing the swell of her breast with a light touch, using the other hand to pull her hips more firmly into him. She broke the kiss and leaned her forehead against his with a long sigh.

“Kai Michael Hansen, give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just save the Universe a lot of fucking trouble and break your neck now?”

She was telling the truth, he knew. If she decided to do it she could, without a doubt; but then, the fact she’d let him get this far told him that he was probably safe. Unless she was like a spider that ate its mate after screwing it, of course. He pushed that thought to the back of his mind, labelling it unhelpful.

“Because,” he said, leaning in to lick across her lower lip, still stroking her breast, “I’m one hell of a lay.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Dynamite.”

“Hmm.”

They kissed again, and he knew he was winning. Something about the way she pulled him into her body, ground their hips together and ran her nails along his back, slipping her hands under his shirt and teasing the skin along his spine. He tipped his head back, giving her access to his throat; maybe, the thought occurred to him, he ought to be more careful. But then, she’d know if he held anything back and he was out to make a good impression, so what the Hell.

She nipped her way up his throat, licked his chin and chuckled when he groaned.

“Why don’t we,” she said with a grin, eyes sparkling with a mixture of humour and lust, “take this to the bedroom - and you can see just how much skin is inked?”

He laughed, grabbed her hand and towed her out of the kitchen.

“Good idea.”

~*~

It didn’t take them long to strip, and when she tackled him back onto the bed he laughed; he’d known she was strong but she’d pretty much thrown him across half the room. He got the impression he was about to be as sorely tested as he’d ever been, and his cock twitched at the thought. She rolled him over, straddled his hips and growled.

“You ready for this?”

He grinned at her, and stroked her flanks. She shivered and twisted under his grasp, never losing the predatory look in her eye.

“Oh, I’m ready,” he said, his grin shading to one that could only be described as wicked, “the question is, are you?”

She cocked an eyebrow at him, quirking her mouth in a half smile. “Confident, aren’t you?”

He pulled her down for another kiss, rolling them onto their sides and rubbing his hardness against her, stroking her back and holding her tight to his body. “Oh yeah,” he said, nuzzling his way down her neck, nipping at her then licking over the spot. She shuddered, pushing him back over and worrying gently at the skin of his throat with a growl; he moaned, arching into her touch, and she laughed. She began to nip her way down his body, making him arch with the things she was doing with rough fingertips over sensitive nerve endings, stopping when she reached his hips.

“Because I tell you, boy,” she said, tone dropping, shaded with lust and sounding as dangerous as Kai had ever heard another human, let alone a woman, “if you’re dynamite, I’m ten pounds of fucking semtex...”

She sucked the head of his cock into her mouth, and he yelled. He grabbed her hair, twisting the silky strands of blue-flashed black between his fingers, tugging at it but fighting the urge to just push her down onto him; he didn’t need to, as she was taking him down to the root in a series of quick gulps, working her way back up with a hard suck, lapping at the tip and beginning all over again. That wasn’t all; her fingers rolled and squeezed his balls before moving back to press on the skin behind them, tickling it with her nails and drawing sounds from him that wouldn’t have disgraced a cat’s chorus.

Chuckling at the yowls - the low sound of amusement transmitted to his cock, driving him crazy - she slipped a finger in her mouth, rubbing the tip of his hardness and wetting it with precum and saliva before going back to her very enthusiastic blowjob. He didn’t even think about what she was up to, so bright were the fireworks going off in his head, until she carefully pushed the tip of it into his arse while rubbing his balls with the palm of her other hand.

He shrieked and arched, letting himself accept the intrusion and howling when she hit a particular spot that rang in his head like a bell, blinding him with effervescent sparks and making him harder than he’d ever been in his life. Much as he was enjoying this he had to stop her, right now, or he was going to have the sort of orgasm that turns all men into immediate snoring heaps, brains leaking from their ears and bodies so sated they couldn’t so much as twitch.

He yanked on her hair, pulling her up him almost by main force; she wasn’t angry with him, but quite the opposite. She let him roll her over, boneless with laughter.

“Responsive little thing, aren’t you?”

“Less of the little,” he panted, and flew at her. She arched and yelped, still laughing, giving him access to herself even as she continued to tease every part of his body she could reach. He paused in his worship of her heavy breasts when she stroked his wet cock with her toes, using her foot to trap his cock against his stomach and rolling his balls with those short, but talented digits. He swore and resumed his attack, making sure that he didn’t neglect a single square centimetre of flesh as he wriggled down her body, still letting out the occasional yelp whenever she managed to reach somewhere where she could do something particularly spectacular.

He reached her centre, noticing with a wince that yes, the tattoos did indeed go everywhere and that she had some piercings that he found frankly terrifying. She purred, rubbing her fingertips across his scalp in a sensual massage that almost - almost - distracted him from the job in hand. He nuzzled, glad for the lack of hair he found, stroking the wet flesh with delicacy and blowing on it, stroking the inside of her thighs and listening to her hiss with a grin.

Then he really got to work, keeping his hands active even as he reached with his tongue, lapping at the folds of heat and sucking them into his mouth, rolling them under the flat of his tongue then stiffening it, lapping hard even while the fingers of one hand stroked at her opening, tracing the quivers with the nail of one finger then slipping it inside. She arched, bucking her hips hard enough that he had to use one hand to pin her down, laughing into her pussy as she yelped and swore, fisted the sheets and twisted her spine, writhing and swearing in a dozen languages.

He pulled back, drawing a long wail from her, sat back on his heels and wiped his chin with his fingers, leaning forward and offering them to her to suck. She took them into her mouth one at a time, never taking her gaze from him as she curled her tongue around them and sucked them until he groaned.

“Ready for the main event?” he asked, and at her twitched eyebrow leaned forward to kiss her, wriggling his hips into position and nudging at her wet heat with the tip of his aching, dripping cock.

They moaned into each other’s mouths as he sheathed himself slowly. He broke off, resting his head on her shoulder while he circled his hips, feeling her feet stroke the backs of his legs while she clenched herself around him, adjusting to--

The phone rang.

They stared at each other, letting it ring again. As soon as the machine picked it up, Henjo’s voice could be heard echoing through the apartment, and the panic in it got them both moving.

 _“Kai! Kai, for all that’s holy pick up the fucking phone. I know you’re there! Yoz, Kai, anybody. Help me - it’s Dirk, he’s gone crazy and he says he’ll kill me and then himself--”_

The line went dead.

“Fuck!” yelled Kai, scrambling for his clothes.

“Not right now we aren’t,” Yoz snapped, hopping into her boots and running for her jacket, dressed before he’d got his jeans on. He caught her at the door, hair and eyes wild, clutching his car keys; he was hoping he would find something in her eyes to comfort him, but there was nothing there that made him feel better.

Nothing at all.

~*~

By the time they arrived at Henjo’s apartment - after a drive so damn dangerous Yoz herself could have been piloting the big BMW that belonged to Kai - all was ominously quiet. She hadn’t so much as broken stride getting into the building, not flicking her fingers or doing anything remotely magical that Kai could see, but every lock she approached fell open at her gaze, lifts co-operated, doors opened. They reached the door they’d been aiming for and hesitated, he breathing hard but she just drawing an immobility around herself that scared him.

“Why didn’t we just - ping! - inside the apartment?” panted Kai, and Yoz broke her stillness with a quiet snort.

“Because do you fancy dealing with a survivor of demonic possession with your main weapon too fucking tired to lift a finger?”

“Good point.”

“I know it is,” she muttered, spreading her fingers against the skin of the door and hooding her eyes, “because it was one of mine.”

He huffed at her with a wink, and she carefully pushed the door open, peering around it before slipping inside, her movements silent despite the boots. The apartment was almost dark, the lights dimmed or switched off; it seemed that Henjo must have been on his way to bed when he answered the door. Indeed, the only room that was fully lit was the main bedroom, and the pair paused in the short corridor that led to it. The door was a little ajar, a slice of warm light throwing the fibres of the deep carpet into sharp relief, making it look for all the world like thick fur. Yoz put her mouth to Kai’s ear. He tensed.

“Nice apartment.”

He glared at her, and she grinned back before putting her mouth close once more. “Stay well back. He might start shooting at the first thing he sees and then we’ll have police and then we’re fucked, right? So let me get the gun off him and we’ll see what we can do.”

Kai nodded. Good plan, he mouthed at her, and she winked again before tapping her chest and flicking her eyebrows again. Yeah, one of mine, the gesture said, and Kai rolled his eyes at her as theatrically as he could. This really wasn’t the time for a pissing contest, but neither of them seemed to be able to help it.

Dirk’s voice drifted to them, and Kai had to bite his lip to stop himself swearing. His friend sounded panicked, words tumbling over each other, and they could hear Henjo’s familiar tones trying to soothe him. Dirk shouted, and only Yoz’ hand on his chest stopped him from bounding forward; nobody threatened to kill his friend, not even another friend. He wasn’t going to stand for it.

Yoz’ glare held him, her blue eye flashing anger at him, nailing his feet to the floor as she ghosted forward, vanishing into the room without so much as a backward glance. Kai knelt down, digging his fingers into the carpet and grinding his teeth with fear; he couldn’t bear just sitting out _here_ while who knew what was happening in _there_.

When he heard the first shot, however, nothing would have kept him still. He bounded to his feet, leapt across the corridor and yanked the door open, crashing through into the room and finding himself facing Dirk - and Dirk’s handgun.

“Fuck,” he said, and Dirk fired again.

~*~

When Yoz entered the room the tension was so thick even someone mindblind would have been floored by it. She was anything but that, and even her shields struggled to keep out the waves of fear, rage and confusion that Dirk was putting out. His eyes were red rimmed, his cheeks were unshaven and he was bare chested under his jacket, bare feet showing under the frayed cuff of his jeans. He was a man teetering on the edge of insanity, and he spat froth across his lips as he screamed at Henjo.

To his credit he was sitting on his bed, knees drawn up and his long arms looped around them, his face pale but under control. If he saw Yoz creep into the room he showed no sign of it, just keeping his gaze fixed on the suffering man before him. He nodded, as though he agreed with Dirk’s panicked ranting, but made no move toward him. In his current state, despite the trembling and weaving of the gun in his fist, it would have been suicide.

Yoz murmured under her breath, sending out a curl of warmth intended to soothe. Henjo felt it, his eyelids drooping; Dirk, however, just leapt straight and whirled to face her, pointing the gun at her face. She stayed calm, starting to lift one palm toward him.

“Don’t move! I know your magic, witch!”

“Dirk. Easy, mate,” she said, pitching her voice low to soothe. He shook his head, taking his eyes from her to bang on the shaven side of it with the heel of his free hand, whimpering as he tried to drive the voice from his head. She bared her teeth, then calmed her expression and began to move her hand up again. “Dirk, you know me. You are not a bad man, Dirk. You did not do these things you remember. You didn’t hurt anyone. You are Dirk Schlachter and you did not hurt anyone. I swear to you, you did not. Listen to me, Dirk.”

He blinked at her, and for a moment she thought she was getting through to him; the sorrow in his eyes was palpable, and even moved her black heart for the grief it contained. His memories of violence and blood were bubbling up from the place in his mind where the demon had hidden, and the rest of his mind was breaking down under the strain. He could no more kill anyone of his own volition than fly, and the things the demon had done whilst riding his mind--

The madness slammed down like a shutter, and he flicked the gun up with a scream and shot her in the face.

Henjo yelped, staring at his friend in utter horror; Kai crashed through the door with yet another yell and Dirk swung back, not even recognising his friend before he pulled the trigger again.

Time stopped, and Kai heard an irritated little sigh. His eyes crossed; a bullet hung in the air in front of his nose, rolling lazily, sending light back in tiny flickers as he watched it and wondered what the fuck--

A familiar hand plucked it out of the air and rattled it with its sibling in her ink-swirled palm.

“What part,” she said through clenched teeth, “of ‘stay there’ were you having difficulty understanding, exactly?”

~*~

All Henjo saw were the two shots, and he’d got no further than his knees before Dirk had spun back to him, sticking the barrel of the gun under his nose. He flinched back, trying to watch the ugly muzzle of the weapon even as he tried to get away from it; he didn’t want to look down beside the bed, because he wasn’t sure he could handle seeing two bodies with their faces shot off--

A heavily tattooed hand grabbed the muzzle of the gun, forcing it down and twisting it out of his grasp even as a very familiar muscular body leapt on Dirk’s shoulders, knocking him down and rolling across Henjo’s bedroom floor. The two men crashed into the wall, and a brief struggle ended with Kai sitting on Dirk’s back, his arms twisted behind him and his face pushed into the carpet. Kai bounced and cursed, and Dirk arched once with a cry and fell limp, silent to the floor. Kai looked up at Henjo, face tight with fear.

“You OK, Hen?”

He nodded, staring at Kai and then back at Yoz.

She grinned, took his hand and opened it; she dropped the two bullets into his palm and closed his fingers over them with a wink.

“Souvenirs,” she said with a grin, and turned away from him to empty the revolver of the rest of its ammunition. She heard the faint clink as he dropped them into the pocket of his dressing gown, and got bumped aside as he rushed to the bathroom.

The sounds of him being sick made her snort, and Kai shrug.

“It has been a long night for Henjo, I think,” he said, and Yoz laughed.

~*~

Dirk swam back to consciousness slowly, drifting up from comfortable warmth and soothing darkness. There had been no visions, no dreams. Nothing to make him doubt that he was alone in his head. He blinked, opened his eyes; The first thing he saw was Henjo, perched on a chair beyond the foot of the bed, sitting cowboy-style and resting his chin on his folded hands. He looked pale, and tired. Dirk smiled at him, and was surprised to see the eyes of his gentle friend fill with tears.

He felt someone grip his hand, and turned to see Kai sitting cross-legged beside him, holding his hand with both of his and smiling at him. Even he looked rather pale, and Dirk wondered what on earth could have been happening to upset his friends so. And while he was wondering about things, what was he doing in Henjo’s apartment? And in his bed. With dirty feet.

He frowned down at them, cocking his head like a bird. Somebody took his other hand and he turned to see who, thinking that if Henjo and Kai were here then perhaps it was Dan.

It would be nice if it was. He liked Daniel.

It took him a few seconds to work out who the woman was. He didn’t, at first glance, know her; one eye was blue and the other was dark brown, and he smiled a little to see that. It was unusual, and he liked unusual women. Her shoulders were bare, and her black hair - oh boy, was it black - tumbled around her face and fell across them, its shadow throwing her brow and cheekbones into sharp relief. She cocked her head at him, and that was when he noticed the ink; unlike his own modest marking, these were absolutely everywhere.

She had good boobs, too. He wondered if the ink that plunged below the neckline of the - black - vest shirt she wore covered more of the fascinating tattoos, and if it did just how far they went.

The woman smiled, and a memory swirled in the depths of his mind.

“Always the first thing they want to know,” she said softly, her voice low and somehow musical. “Just how far does the ink go. Hey Dirk.”

He started to smile, and then the memory of exactly what he’d been doing this evening began to trickle back, a little at a time. He blinked at her, then turned to look at Henjo and Kai, tears now running freely down his face.

“Oh God,” he said, his voice hitching in his chest, “oh God, I’m so sorry--”

Kai pulled him into his arms with a cry, and Henjo was there too; Yoz waited, stroking Dirk’s back gently as the three men clutched each other and cried. She nodded, and for once she let compassion invade her expression.

“It’s a start,” she said softly, and waited for the storm to pass.


	6. Chapter 6

_****_

Part Six

 

Dirk ran out of tears, eventually, and sat back against the headboard feeling as weak as a kitten. Kai and Henjo arranged themselves around him, Yoz staying by his side as well. He took her hand, the two men gripping the other, and turned his face to her.

“I can’t live like this,” he said quietly, and she nodded even as Kai bit back another sob. She stroked the back of his hand and murmured soothing words to him, almost nonsense syllables, anything to try and calm him.

“I understand,” she said, still pitching her voice low, soothing. He sighed.

“I can remember what I did to them. All of them. And there were so many...” his voice tailed off, and he closed his eyes and shivered.

“It wasn’t you,” said Henjo, frowning, but Dirk interrupted him. He kept his eyes closed and his words were sad.

“Part of it was,” he said, and his voice sounded thin and tired. “The demon did it, but there was always a part of me there. And that part liked it. That part loved it. And the demon is gone, but...” he opened his eyes, and his gaze was so filled with despair that even Yoz had to look away, “that part of me... is still there. It’s still there.”

They were silent for a moment, then Yoz patted his hand. “Look at me, Dirk.”

He dropped his head and shook it, the tears starting to come once more.

“Look at me.”

He did, but only sideways, as though ashamed. Her tone was kind, and she smiled at him even as she patted the back of his hand. “That part is in everyone. If you didn’t have it you wouldn’t be human - trust me on this, if anyone knows how dark the human heart can be it’s me.”

Kai remembered the words he’d said to her in his kitchen, and felt faintly guilty about them. She winked at him, then turned back to Dirk. “You can get through this, you know. But the demons don’t want you to; it’s a common thing you’re going through.” She sighed. “People are left with the memory of what they did while they were possessed, and their minds can’t cope with it. They break down to the point that the part you can feel - the part that revelled in it, the part that lets the demon in and which, by the way, you have no control over - takes over, and they end up doing the acts they initially found so vile.”

She paused, and looked at Kai across Dirk’s bowed head. He ignored her, watching his friend with worry in his eyes. She let out a long breath through her nose; he was too gentle for this. Bright and strong and determined he was, but he was too damn noble and cared too much to get involved with the shitstorm people called magic.

She might be doing them a favour if she killed all three of them and fired the apartment. A terrible accident--

Shaking her head she discarded the thought. It had gone too far for that, and she was just going to have to pick up the pieces as best she could. Because if she didn’t, somebody else would find a way to turn the situation to their advantage, and then they really would be in trouble.

Lifting her hand she stroked Dirk’s head, her touch gentle against him.

He looked at her again. “You’ve been to Hell,” he said, and his tone had sharpened rather. “The demon knew you. You’ve been there. How do I know you’re not one of them?”

Kai and Henjo boggled at her. It wasn’t the way she would have chosen to break the news about her involvement with some terribly dark forces, but there. The information was out now and there was nothing she could do to take it back, so she’d just have to wing it.

“You remember what the demon felt like, don’t you? Inside. And you know what it looked like, and you know what it felt like touching you.”

Dirk shuddered and huddled into himself, hunching over before giving the tiniest of nods. She couldn’t entirely say she blamed him; demons were awful things, and the fact that he had even a shred of his sanity left after seeing the true form of one was impressive enough, let alone recalling the feel of the damn thing. It would have pushed her pretty hard, and she had indeed been to - as she had been accused - Hell itself. It had not been a pleasant experience, and was a very nasty place to visit.

She put one finger under his chin and tipped his head up, taking his palm and putting it against her chest so that he could feel her heart beating. Once she was sure he’d felt it, she put his hand against her cheek and nuzzled into it. “I’m human, my friend. I’m not always good, and I’m not often nice, but I _am_ human. You can feel it. I bleed the same way as you do - and if this isn’t enough I can show you.”

He shook his head, but stroked her cheek for a little while before letting his hand drop to lie, fingers curled and immobile, palm pale in the light, not moving. Yoz picked it up, and laced her fingers through his, rubbing it with her other hand to try and bring some warmth back to it.

“I can remember hunting them,” he said, his voice low and despairing, “I can remember tearing them apart. I can remember ripping their hearts out and eating them. I tortured them before they died and I mutilated and tore them up afterwards. I can remember it all, and part of me enjoyed every second.” He looked up at Yoz, and she could see quite clearly in his eyes that he had gone as far as he could, and had nothing left to fight with. Never mind his career going down the toilet if he was linked with the murders, either she helped him or this man would be dead in a matter of hours - and after that had happened, his soul would be straight back in the grubby little claws of the demon.

“Right. I don’t often do this, but I can take those memories away. Permanently. Erase them.”

He looked up at her, eyes filled with hope for the first time since she’d freed him from the demon.

“You won’t remember doing it, but you’ll remember the demon. Not even I can erase the touch of a creature like that - not without frying your brain, anyway.”

Dirk’s face fell, and she reached out and stroked his cheek. “But the memory of what you did will be gone - all you will remember is that the demon made you do bad things. Do you think you can handle that?”

He swallowed hard. “And if I can’t?”

She took a deep breath, and hoped she could get the next words out before Kai and Henjo went ballistic. “I’ll make it quick for you,” she said, and from the look in his eyes he understood her. It took the other two a few seconds to work it out, and when they did they almost exploded. Dirk ignored the shouting and the arm-waving - as did she - and looked into her eyes, searching for truth.

Whatever he saw there it satisfied him, because a smile ghosted across his face and he nodded. She dropped him a wink, and then they both turned their attention to the other two men, who were still objecting strenuously to this part of the plan. Kai especially didn’t want to hear of it; after what he’d seen in Otherspace he couldn’t bear the thought of it happening to a friend. Yoz shook her head at him.

“Kai. Henjo. When you’re quite ready, we have a job to do.”

They shut up and looked at her, Dirk leaning against her and looking almost at peace.

“Us?”

She shrugged. “Kai, to be more accurate. You, Henjo, get to watch.”

“Me?”

Dirk snorted, and Yoz laughed. “You want to learn this magic lark or not?”

Kai’s smile was like a sunrise.

~*~

“Is there not more we need?”

“Look, mostly? Magic is about what’s in here,” and Yoz tapped her head, “and here,” over her heart, “rather than what’s out here,” with a wave at the room in general. “That shit can apply but _mostly_ it’s sheer will and heart and bloody mindedness. See?”

Henjo was back on his chair, watching with fascination Yoz try to keep her temper while trying to teach Kai how to help her and turn his potential into skill. The trouble was he wanted to run before he could walk, and was so fascinated that he kept asking questions that lead her away from whatever point it was she was trying to make. Henjo and Dirk exchanged amused glances; there was going to be a punch up shortly, if Kai wasn’t very careful. The small Magus looked like she was running out of patience, fast.

“But if that’s all it is--”

“That’s a simplified explanation.”

“--then why do more people not do it?”

“Lots do. Now, we need to--”

“And why is magic not more known about? You can do it I have seen it so can it not be measured? In a lab. By normal people.”

Yoz stared at him, and tried very hard to ignore Henjo smothering a snicker by burying his face in his arms. Not only was there no time for this, but she also remembered why she’d never taken on a pupil before; all the damn _questions_.

“Kai, this is the last question I’m going to answer before I hurt you, OK? The answer is that all that protects the bulk of the population is the fact that they don’t believe all this happens to be real, because with all the secrecy and misdirection they think it’s all smoke and mirrors and deception. Plus can you imagine what your average politician would do with abilities like mine? There’d be horrors from Otherspace popping out all over the place to settle political squabbles and believe me, that can get messy. Now, we don’t have time for this so would you please just shut the fuck up and pay attention?”

The last sentence was ground out from between gritted teeth, and made Dirk wink at Henjo before leaning back and closing his eyes. “She doesn’t know him very well, does she Hen?”

“No. But she will, I suspect.”

“Think we should start looking for another frontman now, then?”

Kai chuckled, and Yoz rolled her eyes at all of them before taking Dirk’s right hand in her left and reaching out for Kai’s hand with her right. He linked his fingers with hers, took Dirk’s hand and nodded at them both; linked into a circle she squeezed both their hands and smiled.

“Kai, I’ll hook up with you first, then we’ll go into Dirk. You might feel a bit odd but as long as nobody panics we’ll be fine; Dirk, we’ll pick you up as soon as we can, and we’ll go through and find what we need and destroy it. I’ll do what I can to make the demon’s mark easier to carry, too. Got that?”

They nodded, and she looked over her shoulder at the other man. “Henjo, whatever happens, do _not_ interfere. I mean it. Right?”

He nodded, and she smiled before turning back to the others she was linked to, giving Kai one last long, steady look. “And you - no showboating, no trying anything because it seems like a good idea, no going off alone and for fuck’s sake do as you’re bloody told. OK?”

Kai nodded, biting his bottom lip with excitement. With a nod to both men she took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and began to take the steps required to move them all out of their bodies and into a state of mind.

~*~

Touching her mind to Kai’s she made the first link.

:Right. You there?:

 _Yes._

:Good. Now pay attention. We’re going to be linked - I’m going to be mainly using you as a power source, so just sit there and be quiet.:

Kai’s response was little more than a mental wriggle of excitement, so she carefully looped the edges of her being around his and lifted off from their bodies, pausing to let him see himself from the outside. He’d seen himself before, many times, not just in photographs but on film, footage shot at concerts for DVDs and the like; however, seeing yourself in two dimensions on screen and actually hovering around in three are completely different things. She let him tug them around, inspecting himself with a certain amount of astonishment, then pulled his attention back and pointed out the faint glowing threads that linked their minds to their bodies. Kai absorbed this information like dry sand soaking up rain, then turned his attention to Henjo. He was still sitting exactly as they’d last seen him before closing their eyes, and wasn’t moving. Kai tugged them closer.

 _Why isn’t he breathing?_

:He is. But once outside the body we aren’t regulated by any biological systems - so time looks different. This is astral travel, by the way - like it?:

 _Yeah!_

:Thought you might. Now. Ready to shut the fuck up and pay attention?:

A meek sense of acceptance flowed through their link, and Yoz would have snorted had she a body to snort with. As it was she just had to accept the emotion and hope like hell he meant it, because the next part was critical.

The first place she went was outside the skin of normal reality. They needed to move Outside to gain entrance to Dirk’s inner psyche; travelling astrally was all very well but it was still within one reality; the body and mind were equipped to deal with intrusions from their own time and space, even if most people didn’t realise it. So in order to get inside, they had to go Outside.

She explained this to Kai, and wasn’t entirely surprised when he accepted this lesson without flinching, understanding the implications immediately. He was, she had to admit, a ridiculously fast learner.

Kai, despite having been here before was still astonished by it. Yoz took a moment - and because of the differences in time, it wasn’t going to affect the outcome in base reality - to point out how things worked out here, the steady ticking of the ordered clockwork of the planet, the way that a man’s aura told you almost everything you needed to know about him. She then turned his attention to Dirk, and he gasped.

His aura was the same pulsing, dark blood-red that he’d seen in the hospital, and in his fear he almost fled; Yoz took firm hold of him, wrapped herself around him and refused to let go until he calmed down.

:Any more of that, sunshine, and you and me are going to fall out.:

 _Sorry._

:Fair enough. Come on.:

Closer, approaching the suffering twist of emotion and personality that was Dirk, and then they touched.

A flash of confusion, and Yoz found the thread she needed and pulled--

Kai blinked. He was standing in a dark place, Yoz to one side and Dirk in front of them. Only the place they were standing was illuminated, a patch of gritty black sand that glowed faintly; all around them was dark, and in the distance the wind howled faintly, and presences whispered through the air, unseen but still threatening.

“Whoah,” said Dirk, and Kai chuckled.

“Where are we?”

Yoz cocked her head at Kai. “This is Dirk’s subconscious. This is the deep mind, the primitive part that doesn’t contain thought, only impulse and instinct. This is the part that never gives in, the part that came down from the trees and ran away from sabre-toothed tigers. Pretty it ain’t, but it’s a good place to start. You boys ready?”

Dirk and Kai exchanged glances, and nodded. They were ready.

~*~

Henjo sighed, watching the three people on his bed with a mournful expression. Dirk was pale, propped up against a pile of pillows, black circles under his eyes. He looked terrible; the strain of the past few weeks had told, and he’d lost weight as well as looking like the tour bus had run him over. Physically he was going to have to work hard to regain his former condition - if, of course, he got through this.

Kai, cross legged next to Dirk, was smiling even in his trance state. Henjo could see a pulse in the side of his neck, but other than that he was as still as he’d ever seen him; he wasn’t one for sitting around unless he had to, and the stillness seemed profoundly unnatural. There was something really very odd indeed to see Kai sitting so motionless, his usual bubble of personality muted until he seemed to be someone else entirely. Yoz was right, he did glow - and it took that glow to be banked before Henjo had seen it for himself.

And Yoz. She sat by Dirk’s other hip, holding hands with both men, eyes closed and face schooled to absolute stasis, her expression peaceful if rather stern. Like a statue she was, no sense of anything coming from her, but her grip on his friends was firm and despite his instinct not to, he trusted her to bring them back safely.

Despite not doing so for a very long time, Henjo put his head on his hands and prayed. He honestly couldn’t think of anything else to do.

~*~

The three found themselves in a circular room, the walls ringing them made up of dozens of television screens, each one playing out various scenes from Dirk’s memory. Yoz looked around herself and chuckled; Dirk flushed, and she patted him on the shoulder.

“You can tell what business you’re in, chap. I bet when we choose a memory to work on we’ll find ourselves in a state of the art editing suite, am I right?”

Kai shook his head, looking puzzled, and she turned to him to explain. “Every person’s mind is different. Dirk is with us, so we’re seeing his mind through his perceptions; if we were in your mind it would look different, and mine...” she shrugged. Kai cracked a grin.

“If we were in your mind I would be afraid.”

Even Dirk smiled at that, and she shot an elbow into Kai’s ribs with a roll of her eyes.

“Fucking comedian.”

Turning back to the screens she studied them for a moment, then tapped one that showed a dark alley, a bundle of rags that was almost human-shaped collapsed against the wall.

“That one. Take us there, Dirk.”

He made a small noise in his throat, but nodded and closed his eyes. He reached out, touched the screen and they were in a different place; sure enough, they found themselves closed into an editing suite, a large screen in front of them. Banks of dials and switches reared around them, the whole place looking threatening, in a technological sort of a way; the three of them were sitting in office style chairs, and the machinery around them whirred and blinked, hovering around and above them, seeming to watch them with its blinking lights and flickering bars of colour.

The memory was on the screen, a frozen image; looking down to the blank wall at the end, sliver of sodium yellow streetlight highlighting the derelict curled under his heap of cardboard and rags, drunk or asleep. Whichever it was, he was oblivious to the hungry demon watching him from the alley entrance, hunger and hate making the man’s head throb, urging the stolen body to move toward its prey.

Dirk looked away from the screen, closed his eyes.

Yoz looked at the board in front of her. “Right. Now, somehow, we need to see the whole thing--”

Kai sat forward, muttered and hit a series of switches, fiddled with a trackball in the centre of the array and smiled with relief when the single image on the screen became a long series of pictures, tracing the attack from that first glance to the heap of bloody bones and spilled guts that the demon had crawled away from, belly filled and hatred of the living sated, however briefly. Dirk glanced at it, shooting Kai a wan smile.

“Delete it,” said the Magus, and Kai triumphantly hit a button.

Nothing happened.

“Fuck,” said Kai, and Dirk buried his face in his hands, moaning his grief. Yoz patted his back, then rubbed soothing circles over one shoulder.

“Look, don’t panic. This was a long shot.”

He parted his fingers and stared at her through them, his eye wide and filled with unshed tears.

“What?” yelped Kai, jumping to his feet.

“Yeah. If it had worked then great - Dirk could have erased the memories himself and that would have been better. But as it is we’re going to have to get closer.”

“Closer? And why didn’t it work?”

Yoz looked at both men and sighed. “Because he must have a little bit of natural ability - enough for the demon to use to hide itself from me, enough to resist any attempt to change the past, erase the memory of what happened. I’ve noticed it’s pretty common amongst you lot.”

“’You lot’?”

Yoz grinned. “You’d be amazed at how many musicians I know have some magical talent. I reckon it’s one of the things that makes the difference between success and failure but that-” and she raised a hand to stop Kai’s question in its tracks, “-is just a theory. Right now it means that you, my friend,” and she touched Dirk’s forehead, brushing a lock of hair from his eyes, “get to rest. Sleep.”

He vanished, and Kai and Yoz found themselves back in his subconscious, listening to the wind howl and unknown Things shift and gibber in the darkness.

“Now what?”

She eyed him, and put one hand on his shoulder. “Now you get to be quiet and act as a battery. I’m going to need a lot of that shine of yours for this, so keep it down, pay attention and we’ll see what we can do. And whatever you do, don’t panic - everything we see is a memory, it isn’t really happening.”

“So it’s safe.”

Yoz shrugged. “Memories like this can be extremely strong. And safe is a very relative term. So please, Kai - try not to do anything stupid, OK?”

He nodded, and Yoz squared her shoulders. Time to begin.

~*~

They took a break after about the fifth victim, and Kai curled up into a little ball on the circle of glowing sand and shook. Yoz sat cross legged beside him and rested her hand on his back, feeling him tremble and wishing she’d been able to start him on something easier. He’d remained at her shoulder through everything she’d done, watched her deconstruct each image and unravel it into nothingness - but of course, he’d had to see those images first. And because this was memory and not a photograph, they were three dimensional images with Dolby surround sound and smell-o-vision. The works.

He hadn’t realised that the human body could smell so bad, or splash so far. He hadn’t known how obscene it could look to have the inner workings of a person unrolled for all to see, or that one could be so creative in the process of obliteration.

“No wonder he’s going mad,” he said, keeping his arms wrapped around his head, his voice muffled. Yoz sighed.

“That’s what demons do, I’m afraid.”

“How many more?”

She cleared her throat. “Ten.”

Kai unrolled and stared at her, disbelief written on his face. _“How many?”_

“Fifteen altogether. And then we have to start on some of the other memories, things that happened after. And then we have to take a look at the core of where the demon sat, and see if we can make it a little less painful.”

Kai just stared. “How...”

“How do I bear it?”

She’d been calm, sometimes walking through the memoryscapes to find the ideal spot to begin the unravelling, a shivering and frightened Kai staying as close to her as he could. She’d expressed no grief over the victims, just got on with the job in hand and not flinched from it once.

He nodded, and she shrugged. “I’ve done it before. And trust me, I’ve seen a hell of a lot worse. I’ve seen worse happen to people I care about.”

Yoz cocked her head at his small moan, twisting her mouth into a half smile.

“You said to me: ‘If there’s one thing I have learned it’s that the great and powerful Yoz doesn’t give a flying fuck about anyone but herself’. You weren’t totally wrong, as it happens; but now are you beginning to see why?”

He blinked at her and she held his hands between hers, rubbing them in a gesture of compassion that surprised him, given her words. “Because I’m not going to kill you I need to keep you safe. To keep you safe I have to keep you from total despair. To do that I couldn’t let Dirk kill Henjo and then himself.”

He sighed, and the look he gave her was mournful. “It’s horrible.”

“Magic is like that. That’s why I warned you to stay away. Do you understand that, now?”

He nodded and looked away, then swiped his arm across his eyes and brushed the sand from himself when he got up, turning and offering his hand to her. Snorting in amusement at the gesture she took it, letting him help her up and giving him a quick hug.

“Ready to begin again?”

“No. But let’s do it.”

~*~

By the time they’d got through the victims Kai was staggering, but he assured her he could go on. If Dirk could carry those memories around in his head at first hand then Kai could handle them at one remove. Even the one of the kid, the fifteen year old that had followed him back to the hotel hoping to get a glimpse of her idols--

“Stop it, Kai. It’s over and done. They’re just images now.”

“People, Yoz!”

“Not any more. Past tense, Kai. You sure you don’t want me to finish this alone?”

He’d ground his teeth and insisted. After all, he’d been the one yapping questions at her and frustrated that she wouldn’t show him real magic. Well, here was real magic - or the aftermath of it - and he was just going to have to deal with it. He was definitely going to go to church on Sunday, though. Perhaps a bit of prayer would give his battered soul a bit of a wash and brush up, because God knew it needed it after this.

Yoz fought down the snicker. He was quite serious, but get him out of Dirk’s head and the immediacy of the horror and he’d soon forget; for all his power and shine and excitement he was still very human, and the human mind is designed to blur the unpleasantness of certain memories. Not remove, just... soften the edges of the pain and the suffering. If it wasn’t made so then women would never have more than one child, for a start, and no man would ever take a risk. So the consciousness was programmed to fudge and fuzz memories of physical and emotional bad stuff--

Unless a demon has burned them into your mind, of course.

“Ready to mop up the last bits?”

Kai was staring into the void left by the dissolving of the last murder scene, a young woman that Dirk had caught going home from the venue. It had been unpleasant - and the thought that at this point he’d known something odd was going on and hadn’t stopped it nipped at his heels. Maybe if he’d--

“And maybe if God wasn’t such an asshole the Angels would never have fallen,” said Yoz, patting his shoulder. “Come on. This next job shouldn’t be too bad. Stick close.”

Kai once again marvelled at the fact that his friend was alive at all. If he’d done half of these things he would have put a gun to his head and blown his brains all over the nearest wall - the first time he’d vomited up quantities of human flesh and blood, looking like Satan’s dogfood, for instance. That had been nasty. Some of the things the demon had forced him to do to cover his tracks had been pretty vile, too. He would never have thought the stomach could have coped with a lot of them. It turned out that the human digestive system could be demon-adapted to eat - and process - an awful lot of things, including large amounts of bone, offal, flesh, waste and even entire organs at one go.

“I’m going to be sick.”

“You are not. You don’t have a body right now and an awareness can’t vomit.”

“I am.”

“No you’re--”

Kai retched into the memory of a bathtub in a hotel room, and Yoz sighed. “Get a grip. We’re nearly done, then we get to do the fun bit.”

He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and glared at her, brown eyes burning in his pale face. “Fun?”

“Yeah,” and she gave his shoulder a gentle punch even as she began to unravel the memory with her other hand, a vague wave of the fingers setting forces in motion that would hopefully keep Dirk sane. “C’mon, where’s your sense of humour?”

Kai pointed firmly at the puke in the bath, and she laughed at him even as she sent that into oblivion, too.

~*~

“So where are we now?”

Yoz put her finger to her lips. They’d passed back through the sibilant darkness of the deep subconscious and now approached an area that flickered with static, brief glimpses of a shape outlined with chemical fire and then vanishing into the thick dark again. it flipped between being a sucking black hole, a bulging swirl of bright water, a stormcloud laced with electrical fire, a burning pile of embers that made the eyes sting with poison smoke.

In short, it wasn’t anything he could identify.

“That,” said Yoz, very quietly indeed, “is the centre.”

“Of what?”

“The id. The place force of personality comes from. The very centre of Being. The source and the wellspring and if you get too close it’ll fight you. And I’ll have to destroy it to save you, which would leave Dirk a dribbling vegetable and negate everything we’ve done so far. This, my friend is _really_ where the wild things are.”

They watched it for a moment, then Kai nudged Yoz. “So what do we need to do?”

“Watch,” she said, “and learn.”

She began to weave a series of threads, throwing them to billow around the eye of the wild storm. They circled it, never touching it, staying just far enough away to avoid the flickering crackle of its energy. More she threw, until they were beginning to create a blanket over the area that shielded everything beyond; Yoz grinned - with Kai at her side it was so easy. His apparently endless energy was more than useful, it meant she was going to come out of this - truly very unpleasant, difficult and at times downright evil - job as fresh as a daisy. If it ever got out how damn useful he was he was going to be in a lot of trouble; Mages and magicians and purveyors of power from all over the planet would hunt him down to use him until he dropped.

It was, she had to admit, a very tempting thought.

Shaking that off, she eyed her construction and decided it would hold for a while. Taking Kai’s hand she pulled him closer, pointing out how the Mind was organised this close to the centre. It was a tricky place to be, and she wasn’t sure if he was taking it all in; the important thing, she hoped, was that it was a dangerous place to be and you really shouldn’t go anywhere near it. And when they approached a dark cloud, a seething dark mass that roiled and shifted and watched them with evil intent, he held back for the first time.

“I don’t want to go in there.”

“We have to. This is the part of him Dirk hated so much - this is the bit we all have, deep inside. The bit that welcomes the Dark.”

Kai leaned away from it. “It’s looking at me.”

“It looks at everything.”

“So... how do we kill it?”

She snorted. “We don’t. What we can do, though, is cut its ties to the demon - which will make it weaker.”

“How--”

She pointed to a series of tiny scarlet threads that spun into the distance, so thin that Kai hadn’t seen them at first. “We cut those. There’s more than I thought - are you ready for a real scrap?”

He looked at her, and she noticed that he was beginning to look drained. Crap, she thought, he really knew how to pick his moments. Couldn’t be helped, though, and with her best rogueish wink she flung herself into the battle, tearing at the threads with her bare hands. They fought back, slashing at her like slender razors; Kai stuck with her, throwing himself into her support with the same wholeheartedness he did everything. They fought on until he couldn’t see, his eyes slashed across by the wires, his skin ripped and torn and nothing left to breathe with, dying--

Kai opened his eyes with a hiss, flinching back from Dirk’s concerned face a mere inch from his own.

“Kai?”

He squeaked and fell from the bed, landing on his back with a thump. Dirk’s face appeared over the edge and looked down at him with a smirk.

“You OK?” it asked and he lifted a hand and inspected it closely. No lacerations, still had all his fingers. He felt as tired as if he’d done a triple set in front of the biggest crowd in the world, but apart from that he felt fine; seemed like he’d come back to his body with all the relevant bits and pieces intact. Rolling over and scrambling his feet under himself he got up, having to grab hold of Henjo to steady himself; the blood swirled behind his eyes and he felt dizzy. The feeling passed, and he grabbed both of Dirk’s shoulders and stared into his eyes.

“Never mind me, how are you?”

“Oh,” said another tired voice from the doorway, “I think he’ll be fine.”

Kai grinned. Yoz had rings under her eyes and she looked as tired as he felt, but--

“I think,” she said, “I’ll stick around for a day or two, just until you’re sure you’re OK, Dirk.”

He nodded, and they could all see that the terrible shadow had lifted from him. He would always remember the demon, and that it made him do terrible things but the acts themselves...

Kai shook himself. All gone. Gone and over and it could never touch any of them again.

“Right,” said Yoz softly, and the other two watched them, puzzled. Kai snorted and walked to her, pulling her into a hug and whispering something in her ear.

“Why don’t we,” he murmured, “leave these two to it, and go finish what we started?”

She laughed, grabbed his hand and with a quick ‘later, fellas’ had dragged Kai out of the door and away. Dirk and Henjo exchanged glances, and shrugged.

“Must be a magic thing,” said Dirk, and Henjo agreed.

~*~

Dirk was indeed fine, and within a week Gamma Ray was making plans to get back on the road. Yoz had stayed with Kai, making herself available to teach him some rudiments of how to protect himself; she’d had some long discussions on the nature of good and evil with Dirk, and even allowed herself to be dragged into the studio one day so that Kai could see just how well she could sing. Very well indeed, as it turned out, although she’d met his enthusiastic offers to get a new career started with some embarrassment and a lot of very unpleasant threats.

He was almost sure she was joking, but decided not to push it.

Henjo paid another visit to her room, and it presented him with the goblet he’d used the last time it was there; she said she’d have to have a stern word with it, as giving away her stuff was very naughty. Still, it had never wanted to do it before, so she supposed she could allow it to happen just this once...

Kai was safely hidden, now; they’d performed a ritual together that meant nobody could find him, and she’d taught him how to detect if anyone was trying to find him, and how he could get a message to her in an emergency. They’d also driven his neighbours to distraction with the volume of their lovemaking, as both had a tendency to vocalise like alley cats when the moment was upon them. Kai was expecting them to demand he move any day now - they would certainly be glad when he went back out on tour.

She watched him talking excitedly on the phone, pacing his apartment and waving the hand containing his cigarette around, scattering ash across the carpet and treading it in with his furious pacing. It was time, she thought with a pang, to hit the road again. She couldn’t do anything else, and if she stuck around for much longer then someone would be bound to notice - and then the game would be up, no matter how well she’d hidden that incredible aura of his.

She finished her cigarette, and tamped it out in the overflowing ashtray at her elbow. Kai caught her eye and wiggled his eyebrows, thinking an extremely naughty suggestion as loudly as he could; she laughed, and began to strip for him, trying to distract him from his conversation.

Yes, it had been fun - mostly - but it was time to move on.

~*~

Kai woke up, and wondered what time it was.

He stretched a hand across the bed, and found the other side cold; he’d got used to Yoz passing out next to him, and he wondered if she’d got up for a drink of water or something, and if that had woken him.

Thinking that, if he was lucky, she might be up for another round he rose, pulled on his dressing gown and padded across the apartment in search of her.

What he found made him sigh. He’d been expecting it, but it still seemed so soon--

“You’re leaving.”

She turned to him with a smile. She was dressed, tatty jacket wrapped around her and bag settled comfortably on her shoulder. “It’s time, Kai. I’m a wanderer at heart - always got to keep moving. See what’s happening on the other side of the hills, so to speak.”

“But Dirk--”

“Is going to be just fine. And so is Henjo, and Dan and Eero and everyone, OK?”

He nodded, but watched her walk to the door with the longest face she’d ever seen him wear. She had her hand on the door when he spoke again.

“Stay. Teach me. We’d make a great team.”

She crossed back to him, gave him a light kiss on the lips and led him to the balcony, pushing him outside and following him, standing behind him.  
Yoz patted Kai on the backside, leaning on him and wrapping her arms around his waist. She rested her chin on his shoulder, and put her cheek against his.

"Look up," she said, unwrapping one arm from him and pointing to the stars, just visible through the city lights. "Look out there. It's all out there to be discovered, you know. More than magic."

He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again.

She squeezed his waist, and laughed softly. "Shine on, mate."

He felt a kiss on his cheek, and the arms slide from around his waist, giving his backside a final pat.

But when he turned to look, she was gone.

 _~End~_


End file.
